부산대학교 도서관

Previous studies on the application of tomosynthesis to breast imaging have demonstrated the potential of digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT). DBT can improve the specificity of digital mammography (DM) through improved marginal visibility of lesions and early breast cancer detection for women with dense breasts. To investigate possible improvements in the accuracy of lesion detection with DBT systems as compared to DM, we conducted a quantitative evaluation by using simulated lesions embedded in a breast phantom. A prototype DBT and dedicated DM system were used in this study. For the DBT system, the average glandular dose (AGD) was calculated using a formalism that was a simple extension of mammography dosimetry. The DBT and the DM images were acquired with average glandular doses (AGDs) ranging from 1 to 4 mGy. To analyze the results objectively, we calculated metrics for in-plane lesion visibility in the form of the contrast-to-noise ratio for the in-focus plane from the DBT reconstruction image and from the craniocaudal (CC) image from the DM system. The imaging performance of DBT was quantitatively compared with that of DM in terms of the figure of merit. Although the DM showed better results in terms of the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the mass due to the reduced overlapping of tissue and lesion, an increase in breast thickness of over 3 cm increased the CNR of the mass with the DBT system. For microcalcification detection, the DBT system showed significantly higher CNR than the DM system and gave better predictions of the microcalcification size. We compared the performances of the DM and the DBT systems for various AGDs and breast thicknesses. In conclusion, the results indicate that the DBT systems can play an important role in the detection of masses or microcalcifications without severe compression.