Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of different acquisition parameters
and to characterize their relationships in order to improve the detection of microcalcifications
using digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT).
Materials and methods
DBT imaging parameters were optimized using 32 different acquisition sets with 6 angular
ranges (±5°, ±10°, ±13°, ±17°, ±21°, and ±25°) and 8 projection views (PVs) (5, 11, 15, 21, 25, 31, 41, and 51 projections).
To investigate the effects of variable angular dose distribution, the acquisition
sets were evaluated with delivering more dose toward the central views.
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 electronic noise may
dominate the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) due to reduced radiation dose per projection.
With delivering more dose toward the central views, it was found that the vertical
resolution was reduced with increasing dose in the central PVs. On the other hand,
the CNR clearly increased with increasing concentration of dose distribution in central
views.
Conclusions
Although it was found that increasing angular range improved the vertical resolution,
it was also found that the image quality of microcalcifications in the in-focus plane
did not improve by increasing the noise due to greater effective breast thickness.
Angular dose distributions, with more dose delivered to the central views, generally
yielded a higher quality factor than uniform dose distributions.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: July 29, 2013
Accepted:
June 11,
2013
Received in revised form:
March 26,
2013
Received:
December 13,
2012
Footnotes
☆This study was supported by the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI) and a grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korean government (MEST) (no. 2012–0004846).
Identification
Copyright
© 2013 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
