Mammogram registration: a phantom-based evaluation of compressed breast thickness variation effects. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The temporal comparison of mammograms is complex; a wide variety of factors can cause changes in image appearance. Mammogram registration is proposed as a method to reduce the effects of these changes and potentially to emphasize genuine alterations in breast tissue. Evaluation of such registration techniques is difficult since ground truth regarding breast deformations is not available in clinical mammograms. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to evaluate sensitivity of registration methods to various types of changes in mammograms using synthetic breast images with known deformations. As a first step, images of the same simulated breasts with various amounts of simulated physical compression have been used to evaluate a previously described nonrigid mammogram registration technique. Registration performance is measured by calculating the average displacement error over a set of evaluation points identified in mammogram pairs. Applying appropriate thickness compensation and using a preferred order of the registered images, we obtained an average displacement error of 1.6 mm for mammograms with compression differences of 1-3 cm. The proposed methodology is applicable to analysis of other sources of mammogram differences and can be extended to the registration of multimodality breast data.

published proceedings

  • IEEE Trans Med Imaging

altmetric score

  • 3

author list (cited authors)

  • Richard, F., Baki, P. R., & Maidment, A.

citation count

  • 22

complete list of authors

  • Richard, Frédéric JP||Bakić, Predrag R||Maidment, Andrew DA

publication date

  • February 2006