Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Data Processing and Electronics, Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1, 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Karlsruhe, Germany.
Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg. 2012 May;7(3):339-48. doi: 10.1007/s11548-011-0623-z. Epub 2011 Jun 5.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. The established screening method to detect breast cancer is X-ray mammography. Additionally, MRI is used for diagnosis in clinical routine. Due to complementary diagnostic information, both modalities are often read in combination. Yet, the correlation is challenging due to different dimensionality of images and different patient positioning. In this paper, we describe a method to fuse X-ray mammograms with DCE-MRI. The present study was conducted to evaluate the feasibility of the approach.
For the combination of information from both modalities, the images have to be registered using a compression simulation based on a patient-specific biomechanical model. The registered images can be compared directly. The contrast enhancement in the DCE-MRI volume is evaluated using parametric enhancement maps. A projection image of the contrast enhancement is created. The image fusion combines it with X-ray mammograms for intuitive multimodal diagnosis.
The image fusion was evaluated using 11 clinical datasets. For 10 of 11 datasets, a good accuracy of the image registration was achieved. The overlap of contrast-enhanced regions with marked lesions in the mammogram is 61%. Lesions are clearly differentiable from surrounding tissue by the DCE-MRI projection in 10 of 11 cases.
The described preliminary results are promising, thus we expect the visualization of quantitative information from dynamic MRI together with mammograms to be beneficial for multimodal diagnosis. Because of the use of clinical standard modalities, no additional image acquisition is needed.
乳腺癌是女性中最常见的癌症。目前用于检测乳腺癌的筛查方法是 X 射线乳房 X 光摄影术。此外，MRI 也常用于临床常规诊断。由于具有互补的诊断信息，因此这两种方式通常会结合起来进行阅读。然而，由于图像的维度不同以及患者的体位不同，其相关性具有一定挑战性。在本文中，我们描述了一种融合 X 射线乳房 X 光片和 DCE-MRI 的方法。本研究旨在评估该方法的可行性。
为了结合两种模式的信息，必须使用基于患者特定生物力学模型的压缩模拟来对图像进行配准。配准后的图像可以直接进行比较。通过参数增强图评估 DCE-MRI 容积中的对比度增强。创建对比度增强的投影图像。图像融合将其与 X 射线乳房 X 光片相结合，用于直观的多模态诊断。
使用 11 个临床数据集评估了图像融合。在 11 个数据集的 10 个数据集中，实现了图像配准的良好准确性。在乳房 X 光片中标记病变的增强区域的重叠率为 61％。在 11 个病例中的 10 个病例中，DCE-MRI 投影可清晰地区分病变与周围组织。
描述的初步结果很有希望，因此我们期望将动态 MRI 的定量信息与乳房 X 光片一起可视化对于多模态诊断将是有益的。由于使用了临床标准的模态，因此无需额外进行图像采集。
