Conventional breast prosthesis selection for mastectomy patients faces poor fitting accuracy, privacy exposure, and complicated operation, leading a team of researchers to conduct a preliminary feasibility study to verify a personalized volume customization method based on preoperative MRI and publicly available open-source tooling. They concluded that the privacy-preserving reconstruction technique could help reduce psychological discomfort associated with conventional fitting while providing a more individualized starting point for prosthesis selection.
The researchers analyzed a representative cohort of three breast MRI cases with distinct breast volumes and bilateral symmetry characteristics using open-source 3D Slicer for segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and voxel-based volumetric measurement using the public Duke-Breast-Cancer-MRI dataset. Volumes ranged from approximately 507 mL to 1,228 mL per breast, allowing the researchers to assess the method across different anatomical variations.
Using their approach, the researchers found that the measurements in each case differed by less than 0.5 percent, and concluded that the noninvasive method was privacy-friendly, posture-independent in terms of volume, and avoided postoperative physical exposure, thereby relieving psychological distress. They also suggested that the reproducible methodological framework offers the opportunity for validation in larger cohorts.
The open-access study, “A personalized breast prosthesis volume customization method based on preoperative MRI imaging for post-mastectomy breast cancer patients,” was published in Clinical Imaging.
