Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) of the breast is emerging as a novel tool for early tumor detection
and diagnosis. The segmentation of the structures in breast DCE-MR images, such as the nipple, the breast-air
boundary and the pectoralis muscle, serves as a fundamental step for further computer assisted diagnosis (CAD)
applications, e.g. breast density analysis. Moreover, the previous clinical studies show that the distance between
the posterior breast lesions and the pectoralis muscle can be used to assess the extent of the disease. To enable
automatic quantification of the distance from a breast tumor to the pectoralis muscle, a precise delineation of
the pectoralis muscle boundary is required. We present a fully automatic segmentation method based on the
second derivative information represented by the Hessian matrix. The voxels proximal to the pectoralis muscle
boundary exhibit roughly the same Eigen value patterns as a sheet-like object in 3D, which can be enhanced
and segmented by a Hessian-based sheetness filter. A vector-based connected component filter is then utilized
such that only the pectoralis muscle is preserved by extracting the largest connected component. The proposed
method was evaluated quantitatively with a test data set which includes 30 breast MR images by measuring the
average distances between the segmented boundary and the annotated surfaces in two ground truth sets, and
the statistics showed that the mean distance was 1.434 mm with the standard deviation of 0.4661 mm, which
shows great potential for integration of the approach in the clinical routine.
With its high sensitivity, dynamic contrast-enhanced MR imaging (DCE-MRI) of the breast is today one of the first-line
tools for early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer, particularly in the dense breast of young women. However, many
relevant findings are very small or occult on targeted ultrasound images or mammography, so that MRI guided biopsy is
the only option for a precise histological work-up [1]. State-of-the-art software tools for computer-aided diagnosis of
breast cancer in DCE-MRI data offer also means for image-based planning of biopsy interventions. One step in the MRI
guided biopsy workflow is the alignment of the patient position with the preoperative MR images. In these images, the
location and orientation of the coil localization unit can be inferred from a number of fiducial markers, which for this
purpose have to be manually or semi-automatically detected by the user.
In this study, we propose a method for precise, full-automatic localization of fiducial markers, on which basis a virtual
localization unit can be subsequently placed in the image volume for the purpose of determining the parameters for
needle navigation. The method is based on adaptive thresholding for separating breast tissue from background followed
by rigid registration of marker templates. In an evaluation of 25 clinical cases comprising 4 different commercial coil
array models and 3 different MR imaging protocols, the method yielded a sensitivity of 0.96 at a false positive rate of
0.44 markers per case. The mean distance deviation between detected fiducial centers and ground truth information that
was appointed from a radiologist was 0.94mm.
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