Towards Spatial Correspondence between Specimen and In-vivo Breast Imaging

Radiological in-vivo imaging, such as X-ray mammography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), is used for tumour detection, diagnosis and size determination. After tumour excision, histopathological imaging of the stained specimen is used as the gold standard for characterisation of the tumour and surrounding tissue. Relating the information available at the micro and macroscopic scales could lead to a better understanding of the in-vivo radiological imaging. This in turn has potential to improve therapeutic decision making and, ultimately, patient prognosis and treatment outcomes. Accurate alignment of data, necessary to maximise information retrieval from the different scales, can be problematic however, due to the large deformation that the breast tissue undergoes after surgery. In this work we present a methodology to reconstruct a 3D volume from multiple X-ray breast specimen images. The reconstructed volume can be used to bridge the gap between histopathological and in-vivo radiological images. We demonstrate the use of this algorithm on four mastectomy samples. For one of these cases, a specimen MRI was also available and was used to provide an assessment of the performance of the reconstruction technique.