Evaluation of back projection methods for breast tomosynthesis image reconstruction

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the USA. Compared to mammography, digital breast tomosynthesis is a new imaging technique that may improve the diagnostic accuracy by removing the ambiguities of overlapped tissues and providing 3D information of the breast. Tomosynthesis reconstruction algorithms generate 3D reconstructed slices from a few limited angle projection images. Among different reconstruction algorithms, back projection (BP) is considered an important foundation of quite a few reconstruction techniques with deblurring algorithms such as filtered back projection. In this paper, two BP variants, including α-trimmed BP and principal component analysis-based BP, were proposed to improve the image quality against that of traditional BP. Computer simulations and phantom studies demonstrated that the α-trimmed BP may improve signal response performance and suppress noise in breast tomosynthesis image reconstruction.