Noise Reduction in Dual-Energy Contrast Enhanced Digital Breast Tomosynthesis Using Regularization

Dual-Energy Contrast Enhanced Digital breast tomosynthesis is an emerging technique for breast cancer detection, which combines the strengths of functional and morphological 3D imaging. The projection images acquired with two energy spectra at several angulations are combined to obtain "iodine" projections. These are then reconstructed to provide 3D iodine images. The combination process significantly increases the noise in the images, which is further amplified by the 3D reconstruction. This paper proposes a regularized reconstruction method based on the simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique to be used for the reconstruction of the iodine volume. The regularization represents a constraint for the reconstructed volume, which causes the reduction of the noise and preserves the structures of interest. Preliminary results on clinical data demonstrate a significant increase of the visibility of iodine-enhanced regions without affecting their sharpness and morphology.