LAVI DBT-Reconstruction

LAVI open-source reconstruction toolbox for digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT)

Objective:
Open-source reconstruction toolbox, which features DBT reconstruction with adjustable acquisition geometries. This toolbox is intended for academic usage and it aims at expanding the academic research in this field. Since it is an open-source toolbox, researchers are welcome to contribute to the current version of the software.

Abstract:
Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is an emerging imaging modality used for breast cancer screening. This method minimizes the limitation of tissue superimposition from conventional digital mammography. The reconstruction of the 3D volume from radiographic projections is an important step and it is still a challenging task. Clinical units from various manufacturers differ in acquisition geometry, and thus different reconstruction parameters must be set for each of them. We have developed an open-source MATLAB toolbox for DBT reconstruction. The proposed toolbox is intended for academic usage. The virtual Shepp-Logan phantom and a physical BR3D phantom were used to validate the proposed implementation of the reconstruction methods and the acquisition geometry of the clinical unit. Visual assessment of the reconstructed slices obtained with the proposed toolbox indicates that the reconstruction was performed successfully. The results were evaluated using a structural similarity metric. Visual comparison against the slices obtained with the built-in commercial reconstruction software shows the potential of the proposed reconstruction pipeline, which can be easily modified to incorporate sophisticated algorithms and accelerated using parallel computation techniques.

Acknowledgments:
This work was supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP grant 2016/25750-0) and by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). Nobody does anything alone, so we would like to thank the contribution of our lab members and the Barretos Love Hospital for providing the images of DBT.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Laboratory of Computer Vision (Lavi)
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo
São Carlos - Brazil