Pattern Recognition and Signal Analysis in Medical Imaging || Computer-Aided Diagnosis for Diagnostically Challenging Breast Lesions in DCE-MRI

摘要： Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, but has an encouraging cure rate if diagnosed at an early stage. Thus, early detection of breast cancer continues to be the key for effective treatment. Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is an emerging and promising new modality for detection and further evaluation of clinically, mammographically, and sonographically occult cancers [134,402]. Acquisition of temporal sequences of between three and six MR images depicting the kinetics of contrast agent molecules in the breast tissue allows for detecting and assessing suspicious tissue disorders with high sensitivity, even in the mammographically dense breasts of young women. Yet, the multitemporal nature of the three-dimensional image data poses new challenges to radiologists as the key-information, reflected by subtle temporal changes of the signal intensity, is only perceivable if all images of the temporal sequence are considered simultaneously.