First evaluation of 3D measurements of the compressed breast shape for digital breast tomosynthesis in the medio-lateral oblique view

Improving the modeling of the breast shapes during mechanical compression in both cranio-caudal (CC) and medio-lateral oblique (MLO) views can enhance the development of image processing and dosimetric estimates in digital mammography and digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT). In previous work, a CC model was created using a pair of optical structured light scanning systems, but acquiring similar data for an MLO view model during clinical practice proved impractical with these devices. The present work instead uses two smartphone infrared cameras with 3D-printed holders to obtain surface scans for the MLO view during a DBT acquisition. The study compared the average distance between the MLO breast shape information recorded by the smartphone-based scans to the corresponding DBT exam-based surface scan for 20 patient breasts. Results showed that there was close overlap between the smartphone-based scanned surfaces of the breast and the corresponding DBT images. The agreement between the breast shape represented by these surfaces was dependent on the smartphone-based scanner precision, the segmentation procedure used to obtain the DBT surface, and the manual alignment of the smartphone-based left and right-side view of the breast. The agreement was however of sufficiently good quality for the data to be used for the development of an MLO breast shape model.