University of Twente Student Theses
A method for calculating the breast volume of lactating and non-lactating breasts using T1-weighted MRI scans.
Gierveld, Rozan (2024) A method for calculating the breast volume of lactating and non-lactating breasts using T1-weighted MRI scans.
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| Abstract: | Breastfeeding is important for the health of both mother and child, since it provides, among other things, protection against diseases like diarrhea. Despite diverse benefits, only about 50% of the women start breastfeeding after giving birth, and this percentage declines over time. An important reason for this is lactation insufficiency; this means that not enough breast milk is produced, or that women believe they don’t produce enough milk. There is not much known yet about the physiological processes that influence lactation; that’s why the goal of this thesis was to develop a method that can be used to calculate the volume of the breast when using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans so that eventually, volumes of, for example, blood vessels in the breast can be compared to the total volume of the breast. Using four datasets, a method is developed to determine the volume of the breast in MATLAB. The MRI scans were, however, from the entire body around the breast and therefore, the first step was to isolate the breast. This was done by selecting seven points on three different slices. Five points followed the contour of the thoracic cavity and the pectoralis major to only maintain the anterior side of the body, and two extra points made sure that only the mammary tissue was left. All remaining voxels that had an intensity of more than 10% of the maximum intensity of the slice were added together and multiplied by the volume of a voxel, which gave the total breast volume. The script was tested by one user who performed the script thrice and by three users who performed the script once. The results showed that the inter-person variability had a maximum of 3.75% from the normalized mean value and the intra-person variability had a maximum of 8.79%. In this thesis, the volume of the blood vessels is not determined, but there has been looked at ’maximum intensity projections’ to indicate the amount of blood vessels in the breast. In conclusion, this thesis has developed a method that can be used to calculate the volume of the breast using MRI scans, which is a first step toward understanding the relationship between breast volume and lactation. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | TNW: Science and Technology |
| Subject: | 50 technical science in general |
| Programme: | Biomedical Technology BSc (56226) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/102529 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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