An Ideal Observer for a Model of X-Ray Imaging in Breast Parenchymal Tissue

  • Authors:

  • Craig K. Abbey;John M. Boone

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara and Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis,;Dept. of Radiology, UC Davis Medical Center, Sacramento, and Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis,

  • Venue:
  • IWDM '08 Proceedings of the 9th international workshop on Digital Mammography
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We develop and evaluate an ideal observer for model of the 3D spatial distribution of x-ray attenuation coefficients in the breast. This model relies on thresholding of an underlying Gaussian random field to generate binary objects representing the distribution of adipose and glandular tissue in the breast parenchyma. Our motivation is to evaluate an emerging breast CT device for breast cancer screening. We show how the thresholded Gaussian model fits into the Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) approach for evaluating ideal-observer performance devised by Kupinski et al. [JOSA-A, 2003], and we show some preliminary results indicating that the procedure can be made to generate qualitatively realistic simulations. We demonstrate improved performance of the MCMC ideal observer over a Hotelling linear filter in a small-scale simulation.