Image Processing and Computer Aided Diagnosis in Computed Tomography of the Breast

摘要

Dedicated breast CT imaging is a promising technique for breast cancer imaging. Since it can totally remove the overlapping of tissues it will be even more beneficial for women with dense breasts. Still there is a lot to be done for advancing the breast CT technology. One direction of development is to improve the image quality via some post-acquisition processing techniques which is the goal of this project. Specifically two subtasks are considered: 1) to remove scattered radiation and 2) to remove noise. So far the Gaussian noise model has been proposed and the corresponding Bayesian version is constructed for scatter compensation. A PDEtomo denoising technique has been proposed and implemented which takes into account the relationship between the variance of line integrals through different region of breast and the number of photons hitting the detector. Results show that they are effective for the specific tasks. In addition some other techniques are being explored or under further evaluation. The project has progressed to the stage where a computer aided diagnosis tool is under development for the assessment of mass detectability based on the original breast CT volumes and those with image processing.