Abstract
MRI screening of high-risk patients for breast cancer provides very high sensitivity, but with a high recall rate and negative biopsies. Comparing the current exam to prior exams reduces the number of follow-up procedures requested by radiologists. Such comparison, however, can be challenging due to the highly deformable nature of breast tissues. Automated co-registration of multiple scans has the potential to aid diagnosis by providing 3D images for side-by-side comparison and also for use in CAD systems. Although many deformable registration techniques exist, they generally have a large number of parameters that need to be optimized and validated for each new application. Here, we propose a framework for such optimization and also identify the optimal input parameter set for registration of 3D T1-weighted MRI of breast using Elastix, a widely used and freely available registration tool. A numerical simulation study was first conducted to model the breast tissue and its deformation through finite element (FE) modeling. This model generated the ground truth for evaluating the registration accuracy by providing the deformation of each voxel in the breast volume. An exhaustive search was performed over various values of 7 registration parameters (4050 different combinations of parameters were assessed) and the optimum parameter set was determined. This study showed that there was a large variation in the registration accuracy of different parameter sets ranging from 0.29 mm to 2.50 mm in median registration error and 3.71 mm to 8.90 mm in 95 percentile of the registration error. Mean registration errors of 0.32 mm, 0.29 mm, and 0.30 mm and 95 percentile errors of 3.71 mm, 5.02 mm, and 4.70 mm were obtained by the three best parameter sets. The optimal parameter set was applied to consecutive breast MRI scans of 13 patients. A radiologist identified 113 landmark pairs (~ 11 per patient) which were used to assess registration accuracy. The results demonstrated that using the optimal registration parameter set, a registration accuracy (in mm) of 3.4 [1.8 6.8] was achieved.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Hylton N: Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging as an imaging biomarker. J Clin Oncol 24(20):3293–3298, 2006
Leach MO: Screening with magnetic resonance imaging and mammography of a UK population at high familial risk of breast cancer: A prospective multicentre cohort study (MARIBS). Lancet 365(9473):1769–1778, 2005
Kuhl CK: MRI of breast tumors. Eur. Radiol. 10(1):46–58, 2000
Behrens S et al.: Computer assistance for MR based diagnosis of breast cancer: Present and future challenges. Comput Med Imaging Graph 31(4–5):236–247, 2007
Partridge SC, Stone KM, Strigel RM, DeMartini WB, Peacock S, Lehman CD: Breast DCE-MRI: Influence of post-contrast timing on automated lesion kinetics assessments and discrimination of benign and malignant lesions. Acad. Radiol. 21(9):1195–1203, 2014
Partridge SC, DeMartini WB, Kurland BF, Eby PR, White SW, Lehman CD: Differential diagnosis of mammographically and clinically occult breast lesions on diffusion-weighted MRI. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 31(3):562–570, 2010
Schnall MD, Ikeda DM: Lesion diagnosis working group report. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 10(6):982–990, 1999
David EA, Marshall MB: Review of chest wall tumors: A diagnostic, therapeutic, and reconstructive challenge. Semin. Plast. Surg. 25(1):16–24, 2011
Abramovici G, Mainiero MB: Screening breast MR imaging: Comparison of interpretation of baseline and annual follow-up studies. Radiology 259(1):85–91, 2011
Frankel SD, Sickles EA, Curpen BN, Sollitto RA, Ominsky SH, Galvin HB: Initial versus subsequent screening mammography: Comparison of findings and their prognostic significance. AJR Am J Roentgenol 164(5):1107–1109, 1995
Liberman L, Menell JH: Breast imaging reporting and data system (BI-RADS). Radiol. Clin. North Am. 40(3):409–430, 2002
Boehler T, Schilling K, Bick U, Hahn HK: Deformable image registration of follow-up breast magnetic resonance images BT—Biomedical image registration: 4th International Workshop, WBIR 2010, Lübeck, Germany, July 11–13, 2010. Proceedings. In: Fischer B, Dawant BM, Lorenz C Eds. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010, pp 13–24
Oliveira FPM, Tavares JMRS: Medical image registration: A review. In: Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering, vol. 17, no. 2. Taylor & Francis, 2014, pp 73–93
Viergever MA, Maintz JBA, Klein S, Murphy K, Staring M, Pluim JPW: A survey of medical image registration—Under review. Med. Image Anal. 33:140–144, 2016
Froh MS, Barber DC, Brock KK, Plewes DB, Martel AL: Piecewise-quadrilateral registration by optical flow—Applications in contrast-enhanced MR imaging of the breast BT—Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention—MICCAI 2006: 9th International Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, October 1-. In: Larsen R, Nielsen M, Sporring J Eds. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2006, pp 686–693
Schnabel JA et al.: Validation of nonrigid image registration using finite-element methods: Application to breast MR images. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 22(2):238–247, 2003
Tanner C et al.: Quantitative evaluation of free-form deformation registration for dynamic contrast-enhanced MR mammography. Med. Phys. 34(4):1221, 2007
Klein S, Staring M, Murphy K, Viergever MA, Pluim JPW: Elastix: A toolbox for intensity-based medical image registration. IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 29(1):196–205, 2010
Avants BB, Tustison NJ, Song G, Cook PA, Klein A, Gee JC: A reproducible evaluation of ANTs similarity metric performance in brain image registration. Neuroimage 54(3):2033–2044, 2011
Mehrabian H, Campbell G, Samani A: A constrained reconstruction technique of hyperelasticity parameters for breast cancer assessment. Phys. Med. Biol. 55(24):7489–7508, 2010
Mehrabian H, Samani A: An iterative hyperelastic parameters reconstruction for breast cancer assessment. In: Proceedings of SPIE Medical Imaging: Physiology, Function, and Structure from Medical Images, 2008, vol. 6916, pp 69161C–69161C–9
Samani A, Zubovits J, Plewes D: Elastic moduli of normal and pathological human breast tissues: An inversion-technique-based investigation of 169 samples. Phys Med Biol 52:1565–1576, 2007
Xu H, Varghese T, Madsen EL: Analysis of shear strain imaging for classifying breast masses: Finite element and phantom results. Med. Phys. 38(11):6119–6127, 2011
Rueckert D, Sonoda LI, Hayes C, Hill DL, Leach MO, Hawkes DJ: Nonrigid registration using free-form deformations: Application to breast MR images. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 18(8):712–721, 1999
Pluim JPW, Maintz JBA, Viergever MA: Mutual-information-based registration of medical images: A survey. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 22(8):986–1004, 2003
Gubern-Mérida A et al.: Automated localization of breast cancer in DCE-MRI. Med. Image Anal. 20(1):265–274, 2015
Ojeda-Fournier H, Choe KA, Mahoney MC: Recognizing and interpreting artifacts and pitfalls in MR imaging of the breast. Radiographics 27 Suppl 1:S147–S164, 2007
Jang JY et al.: Clinical significance of interval changes in breast lesions initially categorized as probably benign on breast ultrasound. Medicine (Baltimore). 96(12):1–7, 2017
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) for funding this work through CIHR grant number 115161.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Mehrabian, H., Richmond, L., Lu, Y. et al. Deformable Registration for Longitudinal Breast MRI Screening. J Digit Imaging 31, 718–726 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-018-0063-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-018-0063-1