A New Approach to Digital Breast Tomosynthesis for Breast Cancer Screening

摘要

Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is being proposed as a replacement for conventional mammography for breast cancer screening. However, there are limitations to DBT that reduce its effectiveness for screening, principally, difficulty in imaging microcalcifications and increased reading times by radiologists. We propose a method to overcome these limitations. Our proposed method is to divide the total dose given to the patient unequally such that one projection uses at least half of the dose and the remaining dose is divided over the remaining projections. We assume that in screening with DBT, only a single view is obtained using twice the dose of a conventional mammogram. All the projection images are used in the reconstruction. The 2D projection image that received the highest dose is analyzed by a computer-aided detection (CADe) scheme for microcalcifications. The radiologist views the 3D image set, with mass CADe, principally to search for masses and the 2D image to search for clustered microcalcifications with CADe. Since the 3D image set is for mass detection, the image can be reconstructed using larger sized pixels. This will reduce computation time and image noise. In principle, radiologists can review the tomosynthesis slices faster since they do not have to search for microcalcifications. We believe that by producing both a high resolution, "standard" dose 2D image and a lower resolution 3D image set, both calcifications and masses can be optimally imaged and detected in a time efficient manner.