Development of an Analytic Breast Phantom for Quantitative Comparison of Reconstruction Algorithms for Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is an emerging modality for breast imaging. A typical tomosynthesis image is reconstructed from projection data acquired at a limited number of views over a limited angular range. In general, the quantitative accuracy of the image can be significantly compromised by severe artifacts and non-isotropic resolution resulting from the incomplete data. Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that DBT may yield useful information for detection/classification tasks and thus is considered a promising breast imaging modality currently undergoing pre-clinical evaluation trials. The purpose of this work is to conduct a preliminary, but systematic, investigation and evaluation of the properties of reconstruction algorithms that have been proposed for DBT. We use a breast phantom designed for DBT evaluation to generate analytic projection data for a typical DBT configuration, which is currently undergoing pre-clinical evaluation. The reconstruction algorithms under comparison include (i) filtered backprojection (FBP), (ii) expectation maximization (EM), and (iii) TV-minimization algorithms. Results of our studies indicate that FBP reconstructed images are generally noisier and demonstrate lower in-depth resolution than those obtained through iterative reconstruction and that the TVminimization reconstruction yield images with reduced artifacts as compared to that obtained with other algorithms under study.