Master of Science Thesis Complementary analysis of breast cancer using MRI and breast tomosynthesis

The purpose of this work is to explore and quantify physical metrics of breast tumors in both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and breast tomosynthesis (BT) images, and relate these metrics to pathophysiological and histopathological ndings. An analysis of breast specimens containing tumors will be employed to determine BT metrics of interest. These metrics will then be applied to patient images to test whether they are suitable in predicting malignancy or not. Clinical images of 10 patients who have undergone both MRI and BT examinations have been obtained and studied in this project. The tumors seen in the tomosynthesis slices were characterized by objective measures such as degree of spiculation, irregularity and size. These measures were compared to contrast uptake curves created from the respective tumors in the MR images. Two di erent MRI methods (wash-in/wash-out and persistent curve type percentage) were established and compared. Both methods have a sensitivity of 100% but the speci city is higher for the persistent curve type percentage method. With regards to the BT metrics, the parameters irregularity and ellipticity both had a signi cant di erence between malignant and benign cases. No relationship was observed in the inter-metric analysis of the BT and MRI metrics, however, not enough data was available to draw any conclusions. The results indicate that the BT parameters irregularity and ellipticity may be useful for di erentiation between malignant and benign tumors.