Effect of acquisition parameters on digital breast tomosynthesis: Total angular range and number of projection views

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of different acquisition parameters and to determine the optimal set of acquisition parameters of projection views (PVs) for the new developed digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) system. The DBT imaging parameters were optimized using 32 different acquisition sets with six angular ranges (±5°, ±10°, ±13°, ±17°, ±21°, and ±25°) and eight projection views (5, 11, 15, 21, 25, 31, 41, and 51 prjections). In addition to the contrastto-noise ratio (CNR), the artifact spread function (ASF) was used to quantify the in-focus plane artifacts along the z-direction in order to explore the relationship between the acquisition parameters and the image quality. A commercially, available breast-mimicking phantom was imaged to qualitatively verify our results. Our results show that a wide angular range improved the reconstructed image quality in the z-direction. If a large number of projections are acquired, then the electronic noise may dominate the CNR due to reduce the radiation dose per projection. Although increasing angular range was found to improve the vertical resolution, due to greater effective breast thickness, the image quality of microcalcifications in the in-focus plane was also found not to be improved by increasing the noise. Therefore, potential trade-offs of these physical imaging properties must be considered to optimize the acquisition configuration of a DBT system. Our results suggest possible directions for further improvements in DBT systems for high quality imaging.