Digital breast tomosynthesis seems to have the potential to overcome the limitations due to tissue superposition found in planar X-ray mammography. For this reason, this technology could represent an alternative technique to be used in breast screening programmes. Likewise, dedicated breast CT is also currently being explored, however, the latter might be very expensive technology to implement.
Breast tomosynthesis it is like to conventional tomography. However, In digital tomosynthesis, only a limited rotation angle (e.g., 15-60 degrees) with a lower number of discrete exposures (e.g., 7-51) than CT. This incomplete set of projections is digitally processed to yield images similar to conventional tomography with a limited depth of field. However, because the image processing is digital, a series of slices at different depths and with different thicknesses can be reconstructed from the same acquisition, saving both time and radiation exposure.
Reconstruction algorithms for tomosynthesis are different from those of conventional CT because the conventional filtered back projection algorithm requires a complete set of data. Iterative algorithms based upon expectation maximization are most commonly used, but are computationally intensive.
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