A method for quantifying vascularity in breast cancer using the color Doppler method

Evaluation of vascularity in breast tumor provides important information that can help in discriminating between malignant and benign lesions. Because of equipment dependence and the intrinsic limitations of color Doppler itself, however, conventional color Doppler imaging provides only qualitative information on intratumor vascularity. Here we propose a method for obtaining quantitative information on vascularity within breast tumors by using three- dimensional color Doppler imaging data. In addition to ordinary color Doppler, which we call velocity mode, power mode, a newer approach to flow imaging, was adopted for obtaining the proposed parameters representing intratumor vascularity: color pixel density (CPD), mean color Doppler velocity (MDV), variance of Doppler velocity (VDV), and variance of power level (VPL). Results obtained by applying the proposed method to patient data showed that intratumor vascularity of malignant tumors tended to be greater than that of benign tumors and indicated that the method may hold promise as a way to distinguish between malignant and benign lesions.