A Fast, Segmentation-Free, Method for Constructing a Biomechanical Model of the Breast from DCE-MRI Data

This paper presents a method for constructing a biomechanical breast model which does not require an initial time- and labour-intensive segmentation of the breast tissue. This is achieved by mapping voxel intensity and enhancement levels directly to Youngpsilas modulus values characteristic of the respective tissues. We demonstrate this new method by incorporating it into a biomechanically based registration evaluation framework, which produces qualitatively the same results as a segmentation based model.