Simultaneous digital breast tomosynthesis and mechanical imaging in women recalled from screening: a preliminary analysis

We have developed a method for simultaneous tomosynthesis and mechanical imaging, called DBTMI. Mechanical imaging measures the stress distribution over the compressed breast surface. Malignant tissue is usually stiffer than benign, which results in higher stress on the compressed breast and enables to distinguish malignant from benign findings. By combining tomosynthesis and mechanical imaging, we could improve cancer detection accuracy by reducing the number of false positive findings. In this study we have analysed clinical DBTMI data, collected from 52 women from an ongoing pilot study at the Skåne University Hospital, Malmö, Sweden. We measured the range of the average stress over the breast surface, the range of average stress over the location of suspected lesions, and the normalized stress over the lesion location. Preliminary results show that the range of stress over the breast surface was 1.23-5.84 kPa, the range over the lesion location 2.10-10.10 kPa, and the normalized stress 1.12-2.44 over the lesion location. Overall, the local stress over malignant lesions was higher than the average stress over the entire breast surface. This is the first step investigating criteria to distinguish between malignant and benign findings based upon clinical DBTMI data.