Three Dimensional Finite Element Model for Lesion Correspondence in Breast Imaging

Predicting breast tissue deformation is of great significance in several medical applications such as surgery, biopsy and imaging. In breast surgery, surgeons are often concerned with a specific portion of the breast, e.g., tumor, which must be located accurately beforehand. Also clinically it is important for combining the information provided by images from several modalities or at different times, for the planning and guidance of interventions. Multi-modality imaging of the breast obtained by mammography, MRI and PET is thought to be best achieved through some form of data fusion technique. However, images taken by these various techniques are often obtained under entirely different tissue configurations, compression, orientation or body position. In these cases some form of spatial transformation of image data from one geometry to another is required such that the tissues are represented in an equivalent configuration. We constructed the 3D biomechanical models for this purpose using Finite Element Methods (FEM). The models were based on phantom and patient MRIs and could be used to model the interrelation between different types of tissue by applying displacements of forces and to register multimodality medical images