對國人女性而言，乳癌的發生率逐年上升，近年來由於醫學研究的發展與進步，及早發現並接受治療能夠提高乳癌的治癒率，常見的檢查方式包含乳房超音波、乳房X光攝影及磁振造影等。乳房超音波檢查具有非放射性、非侵入性與成本較低的優點，再者台灣女性的乳房多屬緻密性質，這一特性於超音波檢查下較乳房X光攝影更易於偵測到腫瘤。本研究使用的高解析血流(high-definition flow, HDF)都卜勒超音波，是都卜勒超音波中能更有效地發現腫瘤位置並能提供血流方向及強度資訊的一項技術，更為適用於檢測乳房腫瘤。血管增生現象為一與惡性腫瘤相關的重要因素，可應用於評估手術前新輔助化療之效果與乳癌分子亞型之間的關聯性。本研究利用一個自動提取腫瘤區域之血管中心線的方法，由血管中心線估計出5項血管量化指數、2項腫瘤量化特徵，並且自都卜勒超音波影像中擷取6項乳癌腫瘤之形態學特徵，共計13項特徵進行研究。本論文採用76筆病患資料，針對前置化療第0期至第3期之各項特徵資料在各階段之間的差異值，對應由賀爾蒙受體為分類依據之五種乳癌分子亞型，以單變量變異數分析，觀察特徵與乳癌分子亞型之間的關聯性。 Breast cancer is the most common cancer affecting females. In recent years, due to the development of medical research, early detection and treatment can increase the cure rate of breast cancer. Breast ultrasound is not radioactive, non-invasive, and it could easier detect tumors than mammograghy. In this study, high-definition flow (HDF) Doppler ultrasound is performed to investigate blood flow and solid directional flow information in breast tumors.Tumor vascularity, an important factor correlated with tumor malignancy, would be used to evaluate the effect of the neo-adjuvant chemotherapy prior to surgery and their correlation in the molecular subtypes of breast cancer. This study utilizes an automatic method to extract vascular centre-lines from the tumor area. The vascularity quantization is estimated from the vascular centre-lines, in addition, the morphology features are extracted from ultrasound images. This study includes 76 patients with breast cancer treated with neo-adjuvant chemotherapy. Finally, through one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), observing the association between breast cancer molecular subtypes and each period of neo-adjuvant chemotherapy.
