A Tool for Temporal Comparison of Mammograms: Image Toggling and Dense-Tissue-Preserving Registration

Abstract

Temporal comparison is indispensable for mammography reading. In this paper, we propose a new method to perform temporal comparison of digital mammograms using persistence of vision and propose a dense-tissue-preserving registration method for the temporal alignment. In this method, we use non-rigid registration to deform a prior mammogram to align with its corresponding current mammogram. We apply a dense-tissue-preserving constraint to the registration to preserve the shape and size of the dense tissue areas. Once aligned, we toggle the display back and forth between the current mammogram and its corresponding registered prior mammogram. The proposed method was applied to 11 temporal mammogram cases and evaluated by two experienced radiologists.