In digital subtraction mammography where subtracts the one image (with contrast medium) from the other (anatomical background) for observing the tumor structure, tumors which include more blood vessels than normal tissue could be distinguished through the enhancement of contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). In order to improve CNR, we adopted projection-based energy weighting for iodine solutions with four different concentrations embedded in a breast phantom (50% adipose and 50% glandular tissues). In this study, a Monte Carlo simulation was used to simulate a 40 mm thickness breast phantom, which has 15 and 30 mg/cm³ iodine solutions with two different thicknesses, and an energy resolving photon-counting system. The input energy spectrum was simulated in a range of 20 to 45 keV in order to reject electronic noise and include k-edge energy of iodine (33.2 keV). The results showed that the projection-based energy weighting improved the CNR by factors of 1.05-1.86 compared to the conventional integrating images. Consequently, the CNR of images from the digital subtraction mammography could be improved by the projection-based energy weighting with photon-counting detectors.

Date Published: 19 March 2014
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9033, Medical Imaging 2014: Physics of Medical Imaging, 90334B (19 March 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2043035

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9033:
Medical Imaging 2014: Physics of Medical Imaging
Bruce R. Whiting; Christoph Hoeschen, Editor(s)