Patient-specific biomechanical modeling for applications in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment

Clinicians face many challenges when diagnosing and treating breast cancer. Physics-driven patient-specific biomechanical modeling of the breast represents the new frontier in assisting diagnostic imaging and interventional guidance. This includes helping to co-locate information between various medical imaging modalities that are used to identify tumors, and providing the ability to predict the location of these tumors during different treatment procedures. This chapter reviews the current state of development of such models and their clinical applications. This includes the anatomy of the breast, aetiology of breast cancer, the construction of patient-specific anatomical breast models from medical images, and their application to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment using physics-driven biomechanical modeling. Lastly, the challenges and opportunities in this growing field are outlined.