Simulation of mechanical compression of breast tissue.

Comparison of uncompressed volumetric breast data to compressed projection mammographic data poses a variety of challenges to accurately localize anatomy in both data sets. This work presents a method for simulating the mechanical compression of volumetric breast data. We use an approach based on a rectilinear-grid finite-element mesh and apply the method to known objects including volumetric breast data. Overall results show good agreement with theory and reasonable qualitative agreement with clinical results. Analysis times are sufficiently short to be used in the clinical setting for data comparison. The methods presented here provide a high quality method for simulating mechanical compression of breast data.