Automated Workflow for Evaluating Microwave and Multi-Modality Breast Images

The emergence and subsequent expansion of the field of medical microwave imaging has resulted in numerous approaches to image reconstruction. This includes microwave tomography, radar imaging, and more recently, multi-modality approaches. However, there is an absence of a standardized and widely accepted process that is proficient at extracting information from these images and employing this knowledge to conduct a thorough quantitative evaluation of images and regions within images. This shortcoming may interfere with a researcher's ability to make reliable and consistent inferences from experiments and to interpret results. Consequently, comparing the results of different research groups is difficult. This is becoming increasingly relevant due to the development of standardized test phantoms and the increase in clinical studies. To remedy this deficiency, an automated workflow has been developed with the objective to standardize the processing and analysis of images acquired from a range of modalities. Images are first segmented into regions dominated by a tissue type. Quantitative information extracted from these regions is used for analysis and by visualization tools for the qualitative interpretation of images. The effectiveness of the workflow is demonstrated with multiple examples that focus on quantifying changes to images due to enhancements of the reconstruction algorithm or perturbations of a parameter used by the reconstruction operator.