Correlation of breast image alignment using biomechanical modeling

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the most common causes of cancer death among women around the world. Researchers have found that a combination of imaging modalities (such as x-ray mammography, magnetic resonance, and ultrasound) leads to more effective diagnosis and management of breast cancers because each imaging modality displays different information about the breast tissues. In order to aid clinicians in interpreting the breast images from different modalities, we have developed a computational framework for generating individual-specific, 3D, finite element (FE) models of the breast. Medical images are embedded into this model, which is subsequently used to simulate the large deformations that the breasts undergo during different imaging procedures, thus warping the medical images to the deformed views of the breast in the different modalities. In this way, medical images of the breast taken in different geometric configurations (compression, gravity, etc.) can be aligned according to physically feasible transformations. In order to analyse the accuracy of the biomechanical model predictions, squared normalised cross correlation (NCC2) was used to provide both local and global comparisons of the model-warped images with clinical images of the breast subject to different gravity loaded states. The local comparison results were helpful in indicating the areas for improvement in the biomechanical model. To improve the modelling accuracy, we will need to investigate the incorporation of breast tissue heterogeneity into the model and altering the boundary conditions for the breast model. A biomechanical image registration tool of this kind will help radiologists to provide more reliable diagnosis and localisation of breast cancer.