Breast Structural Noise in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis and Its Dependence on Reconstruction Methods

Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is being investigated to overcome the obscuring effect of overlapping breast tissue in projection mammography. To quantify the effectiveness of DBT in reducing overlapping breast structures, it is important to investigate how breast structural noise propagates during the reconstruction process. Others have found that breast structure may be characterized as power law noise of the form kappa/f(beta). We investigate how the power law exponent, beta, varies as a function of reconstruction methods. Clinical DBT data sets were used to analyze breast structural noise in both projection and reconstructed domains using different filter schemes of a filtered back projection (FBP) reconstruction algorithm. The dependence on filter settings was compared with cascaded linear system theory. The goal this work is to combine frequency domain analysis of breast structural noise with previous work on quantum noise in DBT and develop a generalized framework to optimize DBT for breast lesion detection.