System and method for coregistration and analysis of non-concurrent diffuse optical and magnetic resonance breast images

A method for joint analysis of non-concurrent magnetic resonance (MR) and diffuse optical tomography (DOT) images of the breast, comprising the steps of:

• providing a digitized MR breast image volume dataset comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a 3-dimensional (3D) grid of points;
• providing a digitized DOT breast dataset comprising a plurality of physiological values corresponding to a finite set of points;
• computing 2D projection images from said DOT and MR datasets for a plurality of projection geometries,
• calculating a similarity measure for each pair of DOT and MR 2D projection images to estimate a transformation that registers said DOT projection to said MR projection;
• and
• repeating said 2D registrations to estimate a 3D registration parameters of said DOT and MR datasets, wherein said registered DOT and MR datasets are adapted for a joint analysis.

A program storage device readable by a computer, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by the computer to perform the method steps for joint analysis of non-concurrent magnetic resonance (MR) and diffuse optical tomography (DOT) images of the breast, said method comprising the steps of:

• providing a digitized MR breast image volume comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a 3-dimensional (3D) grid of voxels;
• providing a digitized DOT breast dataset comprising a plurality of physiological values corresponding to a finite set of points;
• segmenting said breast MR image volume to separate tumorous tissue from non-tumorous tissue;
• registering said DOT breast dataset and said MR image volume;
• and
• fusing said registered DOT and MR datasets, wherein said fused dataset is adapted for analysis.