Development of a Novel Upright Dedicated Cone Beam Breast CT

Abstract

This paper proposes a prototype system of novel upright geometry dedicated cone beam breast CT (CBBCT) with a compact size, such that mammography devices can be readily replaced in current clinical rooms. The prototype system consists of a breast stretching device, a servo motor driven rotating gantry, a flat panel detector, a mono-block x-ray source, and a slip ring for signal transmission. For ensuring a large field-of-view (FOV) with almost zero dead space on the chest side, the relative positions and angles of x-ray source and detector on the rotating gantry are carefully designed. The slip ring is used to accommodate the breast stretching device designed to stretch the breast length to match the same imaging volume size as in a prone gesture. The system performance on spatial resolution, CT accuracy, CT uniformity, FOV size and dual energy CT mode are evaluated via preliminary phantom studies.