Keywords:
Cancer, Diagnostic procedure, Image manipulation / Reconstruction, Oncology, Breast
Authors:
A. Iriarte1, G. de vargas2, C. Bore1, P. Bannister1, L. Tsui1, D. Gibbins3; 1Bristol/UK, 2Madrid/ES, 3Bristol /UK
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2018/C-1623
Aims and objectives
This work demonstrates the potential of the MARIA® (Micrima Ltd,
Bristol UK) [1][2] - a non-ionising,
non-compressing whole-breast scanning system utilising radio-waves - to automatically determine the density of breast tissue.
Density can be used as a risk indicator since dense breasts are thought to be more likely to develop cancer [3].
This information can also be used to estimate patient-specific dielectric properties,
which can improve the performance of breast radio-wave imaging.
Dielectric properties determine the propagation and absorption of radio-waves through a medium.
The MARIA® system produces a 3D image of the internal structure of the breast based on the dielectric properties of the tissues. In the breast,
the fatty content is of low dielectric constant,
whereas protein and water in glandular tissues exhibit much higher values [4][5].
So the overall density of a breast varies with its bulk dielectric properties and will have a direct effect on the overall characteristics of the 3D image.
It is the goal of this work to extract metrics from the 3D image of a breast that will allow either a "lucent" (BIRAD density scores a/b) or "dense" (BIRAD density scores c/d) classification of the breast.