Deep Residual Learning for Iodine Estimation in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

Dual-energy contrast-enhanced digital breast tomosynthesis (DECE-DBT) could provide the quantification of iodine contrast with a pseudo-three-dimensional lesion reconstruction, outperforming CE two-dimensional mammography, and hence be a cost-effective alternative to DCE magnetic resonance for breast cancer imaging. However, limited-angle artifacts in DBT reduce its quantitative accuracy. In this work, we propose a deep learning (DL)-based method for DECE-DBT that performs artifact-robust material decomposition for iodine concentration estimation.

Evaluation was performed over 869 digital compressed breast phantoms containing heterogeneous lesions with varying iodine concentrations. The DL network consists of residual blocks, each containing a three-layer CNN followed by a U-Net, and predicts voxel-wise fractions of adipose-blood, fibroglandular-blood and iodine-blood mixtures.

Optimization of the number of residual blocks showed that the 2-block model was optimal for the available dataset, generating hallucinations in under 2% of the tested cases. The network performance strongly depends on lesion size: the average dice similarity coefficient was 0.82 for lesions larger than 0.7 cm in diameter. Therefore, early-stage breast tumors (≤ 2 cm) fall mostly within the size range where the network performs reliably.

Aimed to shorten the path in making DECE-DBT a functional modality, these findings demonstrate the early potential of our DL-based approach for accurate quantification of iodine concentrations.