Image Quality Study in Breast Tomography with Synchrotron Radiation

Abstract

The SYRMA-3D project is dedicated to carrying out basic research to lay the groundwork for implementing breast computed tomography (bCT) using synchrotron radiation, in routine clinical settings in the near future (bCT-SR). This article focuses on the optimization of studies (image quality vs. patient dose). Three ex vivo samples were scanned at the SYRMEP station of the ELETTRA Synchrotron (Trieste, Italy) with the free space propagation technique with monochromatic beam and phase contrast, for 64 different acquisition conditions. So, for each of the energies used (25, 28, 32 and 35 keV); acquisitions were made at four distances from the sample to the detector, (0.2 m, 1.65 m, 3.7 m and 9 m), and for each of these conditions, four conditions of average glandular dose (MGD) imparted were used 20, 5, 2 and 1 mGy. Images were acquired with a photon-counting PIXIRAD detector. The Contrast-Noise ratio and Image Contrast, as indicators of image quality, were evaluated for the 5 central slices of the 64 tomographic acquisitions, in the variant that includes phase recovery (PhR). The results indicated that several protocols provided relevant three-dimensional