Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among women in most countries. Early detection of breast cancer has a significant effect on reducing mortality. Automated three-dimensional breast ultrasound (3D ABUS) is a type of imaging that has recently been used alongside mammography for the early detection of breast cancer. The 3D volume includes many slices. The radiologist will have to look at all the slices to find the mass, which is time-consuming with a high probability of mistakes. Today, many computer-aided detection (CAD) systems have been proposed to help radiologists in mass detection.
In this paper, the 3D U-Net architecture is improved by placing two types of modified Inception modules in the encoder and used to detect masses in 3D ABUS imahges. In the first Inception module, which is located in the first layer of the encoder, various three-dimensional features with two different fields of view are generated. In the second module, which is placed in the following layers of the encoder, line-wise features and plane-wise features are extracted. The dataset contains 60 3D ABUS volumes from 43 patients and includes 55 masses. The proposed network achieves a sensitivity of 92.9% and a false-positive per patient of 22.75