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Open Access Review Issue
Progress in research on ultrasound radiomics for predicting the prognosis of breast cancer
Cancer Innovation 2023, 2 (4): 283-289
Published: 11 July 2023
Downloads:21

Breast cancer is the most common malignant tumor and the leading cause of cancer‐related deaths in women worldwide. Effective means of predicting the prognosis of breast cancer are very helpful in guiding treatment and improving patients' survival. Features extracted by radiomics reflect the genetic and molecular characteristics of a tumor and are related to its biological behavior and the patient's prognosis. Thus, radiomics provides a new approach to noninvasive assessment of breast cancer prognosis. Ultrasound is one of the commonest clinical means of examining breast cancer. In recent years, some results of research into ultrasound radiomics for diagnosing breast cancer, predicting lymph node status, treatment response, recurrence and survival times, and other aspects, have been published. In this article, we review the current research status and technical challenges of ultrasound radiomics for predicting breast cancer prognosis. We aim to provide a reference for radiomics researchers, promote the development of ultrasound radiomics, and advance its clinical application.

Open Access Case Report Issue
A case report of multimodal ultrasound imaging in the diagnosis of giant retroperitoneal ganglioneuroma
Cancer Innovation 2023, 2 (5): 433-437
Published: 10 May 2023
Downloads:16

Retroperitoneal ganglioneuroma is a rare benign tumor that is challenging in terms of clinical diagnosis. Computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging are usually performed for diagnosis rather than convenient and inexpensive ultrasonography. Here, we present the case of a 21‐year‐old female patient who was diagnosed by multimodal ultrasound imaging and whose diagnosis was confirmed by ultrasound‐guided core needle biopsy before surgery. We hope that this rare case will help clinicians and radiologists realize the advantages of multimodal ultrasound imaging in the diagnosis of retropeitoneal solid tumors, and reduce misdiagnosis.

Regular Paper Issue
DG-CNN: Introducing Margin Information into Convolutional Neural Networks for Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Ultrasound Images
Journal of Computer Science and Technology 2022, 37 (2): 277-294
Published: 31 March 2022

Although using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has made tremendous progress in the last few years, the small medical datasets remain to be the major bottleneck in this area. To address this problem, researchers start looking for information out of the medical datasets. Previous efforts mainly leverage information from natural images via transfer learning. More recent research work focuses on integrating knowledge from medical practitioners, either letting networks resemble how practitioners are trained, how they view images, or using extra annotations. In this paper, we propose a scheme named Domain Guided-CNN (DG-CNN) to incorporate the margin information, a feature described in the consensus for radiologists to diagnose cancer in breast ultrasound (BUS) images. In DG-CNN, attention maps that highlight margin areas of tumors are first generated, and then incorporated via different approaches into the networks. We have tested the performance of DG-CNN on our own dataset (including 1485 ultrasound images) and on a public dataset. The results show that DG-CNN can be applied to different network structures like VGG and ResNet to improve their performance. For example, experimental results on our dataset show that with a certain integrating mode, the improvement of using DG-CNN over a baseline network structure ResNet18 is 2.17% in accuracy, 1.69% in sensitivity, 2.64% in specificity and 2.57% in AUC (Area Under Curve). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the margin information is utilized to improve the performance of deep neural networks in diagnosing breast cancer in BUS images.

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