A New Approach For Microcalcification Enhancement In Digital Breast Tomosynthesis Reconstruction

Abstract

We propose a novel approach aimed to improve the detectability of microcalcifications in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) volumes. Hence, our contribution is twofold. First, we formulate the clinical task through a detectability function based on an approach inspired from mathematical model observers. Second, we integrate this new developed clinical-task term in a cost function which is minimized for 3D reconstruction of DBT volumes. Experimental results carried out on both phantom and real clinical data show that the proposed clinical term allows the visibility of microcalcifications to be significantly improved, while preserving an overall high quality of the fully reconstructed volume.