Generation of conspicuity-improved synthetic image from digital breast tomosynthesis

Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is a new 3-D imaging modality that alleviates the tissue overlap problem of mammography. Currently, DBT has been used in combination with full-field digital mammography (FFDM). Although some studies have shown the superiority of combination of DBT and FFDM in diagnosing the breast cancer, this combined procedure has the drawback that radiation doses are increased compared to the FFDM alone. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for generating 2-D synthetic image from 3-D DBT volume to eliminate the need for acquiring additional FFDM. The proposed approach utilizes the conspicuity of the voxels of 3-D DBT volume to improve the conspicuity of lesions in generating 2-D synthetic image. Comparative experiments have been conducted using clinical data set to investigate the quality of images generated by the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrated that the lesion conspicuity was the best in the synthetic image generated by proposed method.