Evaluation of breast software model for X-ray 2D and 3D mammography imaging

Abstract

Introduction Physical test phantoms are a valuable tool in the assessment of novel breast imaging techniques. In order to optimize issues such as image processing or reconstruction, lesion detection performance, image quality and radiation exposure, dose evaluation, it is important that they reproduce the characteristics of 2D and 3D breast images as precisely as possible. Purpose Recently, a physical phantom with a structured background has been introduced for both 2D mammography and breast tomosynthesis. The purpose of this work is to create the 3D software version of the physical phantom and use it for further phantom optimization and extrapolation to CT imaging. Materials and methods The software breast phantom simulates an acrylic semi-cylinder container of height 48 mm and diameter 200 mm filled with water and acrylic beads of different diameters. Planar projections in mammography and tomosynthesis were simulated for the same conditions as with the Siemens Inspiration system. Tomosynthesis slices were reconstructed with in-house developed reconstruction software. Results Visually, an excellent agreement between simulated and real images is observed. Parameters like fractal dimension, power law exponent β and second order statistics (skewness, kurtosis) of projection and tomosynthesis reconstructed images are under evaluation and will be presented at the conference. Conclusion The software breast phantom showed a close match with its physical version. If the mathematical analysis of the images confirms the agreement, the software platform will be used to predict performance for CT imaging and to study the effect of other background structures than beads.