TY - JOUR
T1 - Comparison of fan-beam, slit-slat and multi-pinhole collimators for molecul breast tomosynthesis
AU - van Roosmalen, Jarno
AU - Beekman, Freek
AU - Goorden, Marlies
N1 - Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Recently, we proposed and optimized dedicated multi-pinhole molecular breast tomosynthesis (MBT) that images a lightly compressed breast. As MBT may also be performed with other types of collimators, the aim of this paper is to optimize MBT with fan beam and slit-slat collimators and to compare its performance to that of multi-pinhole MBT to arrive at a truly optimized design. Using analytical expressions, we first optimized fan beam and slit-slat collimator parameters to reach maximum sensitivity at a series of given system resolutions. Additionally, we performed full system simulations of a breast phantom containing several tumours for the optimized designs. We found that at equal system resolution the maximum achievable sensitivity increases from pinhole to slit-slat to fan beam collimation with fan beam and slit-slat MBT having on average a 48% and 20% higher sensitivity than multi-pinhole MBT. Furthermore, by inspecting simulated images and applying a tumour-to-background contrast-to-noise (TB-CNR) analysis, we found that slit-slat collimators underperform with respect to the other collimator types. The fan beam collimators obtained a similar TB-CNR as the pinhole collimators, but the optimum was reached at different system resolutions. For fan beam collimators, a 6–8 mm system resolution was optimal in terms of TB-CNR, while with pinhole collimation highest TB-CNR was reached in the 7–10 mm range.
AB - Recently, we proposed and optimized dedicated multi-pinhole molecular breast tomosynthesis (MBT) that images a lightly compressed breast. As MBT may also be performed with other types of collimators, the aim of this paper is to optimize MBT with fan beam and slit-slat collimators and to compare its performance to that of multi-pinhole MBT to arrive at a truly optimized design. Using analytical expressions, we first optimized fan beam and slit-slat collimator parameters to reach maximum sensitivity at a series of given system resolutions. Additionally, we performed full system simulations of a breast phantom containing several tumours for the optimized designs. We found that at equal system resolution the maximum achievable sensitivity increases from pinhole to slit-slat to fan beam collimation with fan beam and slit-slat MBT having on average a 48% and 20% higher sensitivity than multi-pinhole MBT. Furthermore, by inspecting simulated images and applying a tumour-to-background contrast-to-noise (TB-CNR) analysis, we found that slit-slat collimators underperform with respect to the other collimator types. The fan beam collimators obtained a similar TB-CNR as the pinhole collimators, but the optimum was reached at different system resolutions. For fan beam collimators, a 6–8 mm system resolution was optimal in terms of TB-CNR, while with pinhole collimation highest TB-CNR was reached in the 7–10 mm range.
U2 - 10.1088/1361-6560/aabfa3
DO - 10.1088/1361-6560/aabfa3
M3 - Article
SN - 0094-2405
VL - 63
JO - Medical Physics
JF - Medical Physics
ER -