Abstract
Purpose: Despite the technical improvements in breast imaging, early diagnosis and lower rate of missed lesions remain a primary goal against breast cancer. The aim of this paper is to investigate further the potential contribution of phase contrast imaging, combined with breast tomosynthesis (BT), in improving breast imaging outcomes and diagnosis.
Methods: A phantom composed of paraffin wax with three different embedded mammographic structures, spheres, fibers and CaCO3 powder, was constructed. Mammographic and BT images at two acquisition arcs were acquired, in phase contrast mode of two object to detector distances (ODD). The experiments were performed using synchrotron radiation at 20 keV within the conventional mean glandular dose (MGD) range. Evaluation metrics were introduced in order to assess quantitatively the detection of breast abnormalities and the image quality from different modalities.
Results: Visual and quantitative assessments of the images acquired showed that the increase of ODD resulted in superior contrast and stronger edge enhancement for all the features. BT images eliminated the overlapping effect and made possible the in depth localization of structures. In addition, BT images demonstrated higher values of all evaluation metrics compared with mammographic images especially for the narrow arc of 15°.
Conclusions: The results of this study showed that BT phase contrast imaging is a promising technique that can be proved important for the detection of small details in breast screening and diagnosing.
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Daskalaki, A., Pallikarakis, N. (2019). Image Quality Evaluation of Phase Contrast Mammographic Techniques. In: Lhotska, L., Sukupova, L., Lacković, I., Ibbott, G.S. (eds) World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering 2018. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 68/1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-9035-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-9035-6_2
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