Simulation of mammograms & tomosynthesis imaging with cone beam breast CT images

The use of mammography techniques for the screening and diagnosis of breast cancers has been limited by the overlapping of cancer symptoms with normal tissue structures. To overcome this problem, two methods have been developed and actively investigated recently: digital tomosynthesis mammography and cone beam breast CT. Comparison study with these three techniques will be helpful to understand their difference and further might be supervise the direction of breast imaging. This paper describes and discusses about a technique using a general-purpose PC cluster to develop a parallel computer simulation model to simulate mammograms and tomosynthesis imaging with cone beam CT images of a mastectomy breast specimen. The breast model used in simulating mammography and tomosynthesis was developed by re-scaling the CT numbers of cone beam CT images from 80kVp to 20 kev. The compression of breast was simulated by deformation of the breast model. Re-projection software with parallel computation was developed and used to compute projection images of this simulated compressed breast for a stationary detector and a linearly shifted x-ray source. The resulting images were then used to reconstruct tomosynthesis mammograms using shift-and-add algorithms. It was found that MCs in cone beam CT images were not visible in regular mammograms but faintly visible in tomosynthesis images. The scatter signal and noise property needs to be simulated and incorporated in the future.