SCREENING MAMMOGRAPHY

The Aim of the Project

The aim is to detect breast cancer at its earliest stage. Early detection of suspicious malignancy by screening mammography reduces cancer mortality. Mammography as a method has its limitation because it represents a 3-Dimensional breast as a 2-Dimensional X-ray image projection. The main problem is that many overlapping breast tissue layers or slices sometimes mask suspicious lesions, and sometimes make benign ones appear suspicious to a radiologist. And, because of this 2-D mammography has excessive false positive results and limited sensitivity. The aim of this project is to improve detection sensitivity and precision in common 2-D mammography screening. New techniques as for example Tomosynthesis (DBT) is a 3-D technique that claims an improved precision in diagnostics. However this method unsatisfactory increases the time a radiologist needs to make decisions. It is therefore not clear if these this new 3-D techniques are superior in contrast to traditional 2-D mammography when also the radiologist work load and costs are considered. In this project a computer program creates a synthetic relief representation from a 2-D mammography image that gives an impression of an 3-dimensional structure. The conjecture is that such a synthetic image suppresses non-relevant structures and increases information of importance and therefore improves the detection performance significantly.