Simulation of Dose Reduction in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

摘要

Clinical evaluation of dose reduction studies in x-ray breast imaging is problematic because it is difficult to justify imaging the same patient at a variety of radiation doses. One common alternative is to use simulation algorithms to manipulate a standard-dose exam to mimic reduced doses. Although there are several dose-reduction simulation methods for full-field digital mam-mography, the availability of similar methods for digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is limited. This work proposes a method for simulating dose reductions in DBT, based on the insertion of noise in a variance-stabilized domain. The proposed method has the advantage of performing signal-dependent noise injection without knowledge of the noiseless signal. We compared clinical low-dose DBT projections and reconstructed slices to simulated ones by means of power spectra, mean pixel values, and local standard deviations. The results of our simulations demonstrate low error (＜5 %) between real and simulated images.