Human observer performance on in-plane digital breast tomosynthesis images: Effects of reconstruction filters and data acquisition angles on signal detection

PLoS One. 2020 Mar 12;15(3):e0229915. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229915. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

For digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) systems, we investigate the effects of the reconstruction filters for different data acquisition angles on signal detection. We simulated a breast phantom with a 30% volume glandular fraction (VGF) of breast anatomy using the power law spectrum and modeled the breast mass as a spherical object with a 1 mm diameter. Projection data were acquired using two different data acquisition angles and numbers of projection view pairs, and in-plane breast images were reconstructed using the Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) algorithm with three different reconstruction filter schemes. To measure the ability to detect a signal, we conducted the human observer study with a binary detection task and compared the signal detectability of human to that of channelized Hotelling observer (CHO) with Laguerre-Gauss (LG) channels and dense difference-of-Gaussian (D-DOG) channels. We also measured the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), signal power spectrum (SPS), and β values of the anatomical noise power spectrum (NPS) to show the association between human observer performance and these traditional metrics. Our results show that using a slice thickness (ST) filter degraded the signal detection performance of human observers at the same data acquisition angle. This could be predicted by D-DOG CHO with internal noise, but the correlation between the traditional metrics and signal detectability was not observed in this work.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Breast / diagnostic imaging*
  • Breast Neoplasms / diagnosis*
  • Feasibility Studies
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / instrumentation
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Mammography / instrumentation
  • Mammography / methods*
  • Observer Variation
  • Phantoms, Imaging

Grants and funding

This research was supported by Bio & Medical Technology Development Program of the National Research Foundation (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (2018M3A9H6081482, 2019R1A2C2084936, 2018M3A9H6081483). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.