Abstract
Positron emission tomography (PET) and X-ray computed tomography (CT) are used for the localization and analysis of breast cancer and axillary metastasis. In this study, we develop a method for the automated detection of breast tumors and axillary metastasis in PET/CT images. Our scheme extracts the breast region, which includes axilla, from CT images and then detects high-uptake regions inside the breast region from PET images. First, a bounding box is calculated for the breast and the axilla using bone and lung information obtained from CT images. Second, high-uptake regions are detected in PET images using massive structure enhancement and thresholding. The areas outside the breast regions are excluded from initial candidate regions. False positives (FPs) are eliminated using the location and the shape of initial candidate regions before obtaining final candidate regions. In our experiments, we evaluated tumor detection ability of the proposed method. Breast regions were identified and extracted correctly in all cases. Sensitivity of tumor detection was 0.76 with a number of FPs/case of 3.9. These results indicate that the proposed method may be useful for breast tumor and axillary metastasis detection using PET/CT images.
