Bioengineering, Free Full-Text

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Ultrasound imaging is cost effective, radiation-free, portable, and implemented routinely in clinical procedures. Nonetheless, image quality is characterized by a granulated appearance, a poor SNR, and speckle noise. Specific for breast tumors, the margins are commonly blurred and indistinct. Thus, there is a need for improving ultrasound image quality. We hypothesize that this can be achieved by translation into a more realistic display which mimics a pseudo anatomical cut through the tissue, using a cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN). In order to train CycleGAN for this translation, two datasets were used, “Breast Ultrasound Images” (BUSI) and a set of optical images of poultry breast tissues. The generated pseudo anatomical images provide improved visual discrimination of the lesions through clearer border definition and pronounced contrast. In order to evaluate the preservation of the anatomical features, the lesions in both datasets were segmented and compared. This comparison yielded median dice scores of 0.91 and 0.70; median center errors of 0.58% and 3.27%; and median area errors of 0.40% and 4.34% for the benign and malignancies, respectively. In conclusion, generated pseudo anatomical images provide a more intuitive display, enhance tissue anatomy, and preserve tumor geometry; and can potentially improve diagnoses and clinical outcomes.