Open-Source Reconstruction Toolbox for Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

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.