Synthesized Digital Mammography Imaging

Abstract

Synthesized mammography (SM) is a new imaging technique similar to digital mammography constructed from an acquired digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) examination. SM allows for widespread screening using DBT, maintaining the benefits of DBT while decreasing the radiation of DBT by nearly half. This article reviews studies evaluating SM, most of which suggest that SM may be appropriate to use clinically to replace an actual acquired conventional 2-dimensional full-field digital mammogram (FFDM) when using DBT for breast cancer screening. These results should be interpreted with caution because there are inherent differences between SM and FFDM image quality and lesion visibility and larger, more robust studies still need to be performed.

Keywords: Breast cancer screening; Digital breast tomosynthesis; Digital mammography; Synthesized mammography.