Region matching based on local structure information in ipsilateral digital breast tomosynthesis views

Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is an emerging 3D x-ray imaging modality in breast cancer screening. Clinical studies have been reported that sensitivity of breast cancer detection can be increased by using two ipsilateral DBT views. Matching corresponding regions in the ipsilateral DBT views is important to achieve high detection sensitivity. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective region matching method based on local structure information in the ipsilateral DBT views. In the proposed method, for a given query region, we find corresponding region on target slices by using local descriptor and associated similarity. Experimental results showed that the proposed region matching method achieved the improvement in accuracy of region matching compared with the existing breast compression model-based region matching method.