Computer simulation of breast anatomy plays a crucial role in virtual clinical trials (VCTs) for preclinical optimization of breast imaging systems. Software breast phantoms provide ground truth about tissue distribution and flexibility to cover anatomical variations. We have experience with designing software phantoms based upon recursive partitioning using octrees; these phantoms simulate tissue compartments and fibrous ligaments, which contribute to the parenchymal texture. Realistic simulation critically affects the image quality and the VCT accuracy. Our simulation method may result in artifacts (bumps and dents) due to prematurely stopped partitioning of octrees. These artifacts compromise the image quality by reducing ligament smoothness and distorting parenchymal texture. In this study, we discuss the phenomenology of the artifacts and propose utilization of a spherical approximation of cubes corresponding to the octree nodes, to assess minimal and maximal distance from a cube to a median surface of the ligament. We demonstrate that the proposed technique is complementary to our earlier method proposed to improve smoothness of simulated Cooper’s ligaments surface. We show that the proposed technique leads to observable changes in simulated phantom projections. The effect of the computational overhead introduced by the proposed method on the simulation time may be compensated by an efficient implementation. The proposed method may be also applied to the simulation of quasi-planar structures in other organs and (biological or non-biological) domains.
Anthropomorphic breast phantoms are important tools for a wide range of tasks including pre-clinical validation of novel imaging techniques. In order to improve the realism in the phantoms, assessment of simulated anatomical structures is crucial. Thickness of simulated Cooper’s ligaments influences the percentage of dense tissue, as well as qualitative and quantitative properties of simulated images.
We introduce three methods (2-dimensional watershed, 3-dimensional watershed, and facet counting) to assess the thickness of the simulated Cooper’s ligaments in the breast phantoms. For the validation of simulated phantoms, the thickness of ligaments has been measured and compared with the input thickness values. These included a total of 64 phantoms with nominal ligament thicknesses of 200, 400, 600, and 800 μm.
The 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional watershed transformations were performed to obtain the median skeleton of the ligaments. In the 2-dimensional watershed, the median skeleton was found cross-section by cross-section, while the skeleton was found for the entire 3-dimensional space in the 3-dimensional watershed. The thickness was calculated by taking the ratio of the total volume of ligaments and the volume of median skeleton. In the facet counting method, the ligament thickness was estimated as a ratio between estimated ligaments’ volume and average ligaments’ surface area.
We demonstrated that the 2-dimensional watershed technique overestimates the ligament thickness. Good agreement was found between the facet counting technique and the 3-dimensional watershed for assessing thickness. The proposed techniques are applicable for ligaments’ thickness estimation on clinical breast images, provided segmentation of Cooper’s ligaments has been performed.
Anthropomorphic software breast phantoms have been introduced as a tool for quantitative validation of breast imaging
systems. Efficacy of the validation results depends on the realism of phantom images. The recursive partitioning
algorithm based upon the octree simulation has been demonstrated as versatile and capable of efficiently generating large
number of phantoms to support virtual clinical trials of breast imaging.
Previously, we have observed specific artifacts, (here labeled “dents”) on the boundaries of simulated Cooper’s
ligaments. In this work, we have demonstrated that these “dents” result from the approximate determination of the
closest simulated ligament to an examined subvolume (i.e., octree node) of the phantom. We propose a modification of
the algorithm that determines the closest ligament by considering a pre-specified number of neighboring ligaments
selected based upon the functions that govern the shape of ligaments simulated in the subvolume.
We have qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrated that the modified algorithm can lead to elimination or reduction
of dent artifacts in software phantoms. In a proof-of concept example, we simulated a 450 ml phantom with 333
compartments at 100 micrometer resolution. After the proposed modification, we corrected 148,105 dents, with an
average size of 5.27 voxels (5.27nl). We have also qualitatively analyzed the corresponding improvement in the
appearance of simulated mammographic images. The proposed algorithm leads to reduction of linear and star-like
artifacts in simulated phantom projections, which can be attributed to dents. Analysis of a larger number of phantoms is
ongoing.
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