TWO-DIMENSIONAL–THREE-DIMENSIONAL CORRESPONDENCE IN MAMMOGRAPHY

Abstract

We present a framework for the registration and correspondence of magnetic resonance (MR) (three-dimensional data, 3D, data) and x-ray (two-dimensional data, 2D, data) mammographic images. The robustness of this work relies on the development of a novel method to establish nonlinear correspondence between modalities of different dimensionality, which also represent different physical tissue aspects. The correspondence is based on a 2D–2D matching process, which takes into account features from internal linear structures from both images and a measure of global similarity between modalities (Martí et al., International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 331–340, 2002). The 2D–3D correspondence relies on an intermediate step, which establishes registration between the 2D x-ray image and a projection of the 3D MR data. Initial quantitative and qualitative evaluation results, based on a small data set, are presented that show the validity of the developed approach.