Artifacts reduction based on 3D surface prior information in iterative breast tomosynthesis reconstruction

Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) can provide quasi three-dimensional (3D) structural information using a sequence of projection views that are acquired at a small number of views over a limited angular range. Nevertheless, the quantitative accuracy of the image can be significantly compromised by severe artifacts and poor resolution in depth dimension resulting from the incomplete data. The purpose of this work is: (a) investigate a variety of boundary artifacts representing as the decline tendency of the attenuation coefficients which is caused by insufficient projection data; (b) employ the 3D breast surface information we proposed in this study into the simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (SART) for artifacts reduction. Numerical experiments demonstrated that such boundary artifacts could be suppressed with the proposed algorithm. Compared to SART without using prior information, a 9.57% decrease in root mean square error (RMSE) is achieved for the central 40 slices. Meanwhile, the spatial resolution of potential masses and micro calcifications (MCs) in the reconstructed image is relatively enhanced. The full-width at half maximum (FWHM) of the artifact spread function (ASF) for proposed algorithm and SART are 17.87 and 19.68, respectively.