The promising increase in cancer detection rates^{1, 2} makes digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) an interesting alternative to full-field digital mammography (FFDM) in breast cancer screening. However, this benefit comes at the cost of an increased average glandular dose in a combined DBT plus FFDM acquisition protocol. Synthetic mammograms, which are computed from the reconstructed tomosynthesis volume data, have demonstrated to be an alternative to a regular FFDM exposure in a DBT plus synthetic 2D reading mode.³ Besides weighted averaging and modified maximum intensity projection (MIP) methods,^{4, 5} the integration of CAD techniques for computing a weighting function in the forward projection step of the synthetic mammogram generation has been recently proposed.^{6, 7} In this work, a novel and computationally efficient method is presented based on an edge-retaining algorithm, which directly computes the weighting function by an edge-detection filter.

Date Published: 18 March 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9412, Medical Imaging 2015: Physics of Medical Imaging, 94121Q (18 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2081797

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9412:
Medical Imaging 2015: Physics of Medical Imaging
Christoph Hoeschen; Despina Kontos, Editor(s)