Breast mass detection using slice conspicuity in 3D reconstructed digital breast volumes

In digital breast tomosynthesis, the three dimensional (3D) reconstructed volumes only provide quasi-3D structure information with limited resolution along the depth direction due to insufficient sampling in depth direction and the limited angular range. The limitation could seriously hamper the conventional 3D image analysis techniques for detecting masses because the limited number of projection views causes blurring in the out-of-focus planes. In this paper, we propose a novel mass detection approach using slice conspicuity in the 3D reconstructed digital breast volumes to overcome the above limitation. First, to overcome the limited resolution along the depth direction, we detect regions of interest (ROIs) on each reconstructed slice and separately utilize the depth directional information to combine the ROIs effectively. Furthermore, we measure the blurriness of each slice for resolving the degradation of performance caused by the blur in the out-of-focus plane. Finally, mass features are extracted from the selected in focus slices and analyzed by a support vector machine classifier to reduce the false positives. Comparative experiments have been conducted on a clinical data set. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the conventional 3D approach by achieving a high sensitivity with a small number of false positives.