title: Symmetric Biomechanically Guided Prone-to-Supine Breast Image Registration.
abstract: Prone-to-supine breast image registration has potential application in the fields of surgical and radiotherapy planning, image guided interventions, and multi-modal cancer diagnosis, staging, and therapy response prediction. However, breast image registration of three dimensional images acquired in different patient positions is a challenging problem, due to large deformations induced to the soft breast tissue caused by the change in gravity loading. We present a symmetric, biomechanical simulation based registration framework which aligns the images in a central, virtually unloaded configuration. The breast tissue is modelled as a neo-Hookean material and gravity is considered as the main source of deformation in the original images. In addition to gravity, our framework successively applies image derived forces directly into the unloading simulation in place of a subsequent image registration step. This results in a biomechanically constrained deformation. Using a finite difference scheme avoids an explicit meshing step and enables simulations to be performed directly in the image space. The explicit time integration scheme allows the motion at the interface between chest and breast to be constrained along the chest wall. The feasibility and accuracy of the approach presented here was assessed by measuring the target registration error (TRE) using a numerical phantom with known ground truth deformations, nine clinical prone MRI and supine CT image pairs, one clinical prone-supine CT image pair and four prone-supine MRI image pairs. The registration reduced the mean TRE for the numerical phantom experiment from initially 19.3 to 0.9 mm and the combined mean TRE for all fourteen clinical data sets from 69.7 to 5.6 mm.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK. bjoern.eiben.10@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Björn
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Eiben
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Vasileios
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Vavourakis
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: John H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Hipwell
authors.affiliation: Philips GmbH Innovative Technologies, Research Laboratories Hamburg, Röntgenstrasse 24-26, 22335, Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Sven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kabus
authors.affiliation: Philips GmbH Innovative Technologies, Research Laboratories Hamburg, Röntgenstrasse 24-26, 22335, Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Buelow
authors.affiliation: Philips GmbH Innovative Technologies, Research Laboratories Hamburg, Röntgenstrasse 24-26, 22335, Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Cristian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lorenz
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Thomy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Mertzanidou
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Reis
authors.affiliation: Clinical Trials Group, Division of Surgery, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Norman R
authors.initials: NR
authors.lastname: Williams
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, Royal Free Hospital, Pond Street, London, NW3 2QG, UK.|Division of Surgery, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Mohammed
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Keshtgar
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Hawkes
mesh_terms: D001940:Breast; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008327:Mammography; D016684:Prone Position; D016683:Supine Position; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed
keywords: Biomechanics; Breast cancer; Finite difference method; Image analysis; Image registration; Modelling