Compositional breast imaging using a dual-energy mammography protocol
Compositional breast imaging using a dual-energy mammography protocol
复制标题
DOI：
10.1118/1.3259715
复制
发表时间：
2010-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.8
通讯作者：
Shepherd, John A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Laidevant, Aurelie D.;Malkov, Serghei;Shepherd, John A.
目的：乳房x线摄影对致密乳腺的敏感性较低，因为恶性组织和正常组织的对比较低，而乳房的主要密度是水。水存在于脂肪组织和纤维腺组织中，构成了乳房的大部分肿块。然而，显著的蛋白质团块主要在纤维腺组织中发现，那里是大多数癌症的起源。如果能在不受水影响的情况下对乳房x光片中的蛋白区进行成像，则可以提高乳房x光片的灵敏度和特异性。本文介绍了一种双能量乳房x线摄影的新方法，即全场数字组成x线摄影（FFDCM），它可以独立成像乳腺组织的三种组成成分：水、脂质和蛋白质。方法：采用双能量衰减和乳房形状测量相结合的方法求解三种成分厚度。双能量测量是用全视场数字乳房x线摄影装置对乳房模拟幻影进行的。这些幻影是由具有与成分室相似的x射线衰减特性的材料制成的。它们主要由两层厚度分别为2厘米和4厘米的材料构成。采用最小二乘拟合方法，对26种厚度和成分组合进行了成分标定。结果：简单的三次拟合函数对水、脂和蛋白质的厚度具有很高的精度，均方根误差分别为0.023、0.011和0.012 cm。使用序列图像测试这些测量的重复性（百分比变异系数），发现水、脂质和蛋白质的重复性分别为0.5%、0.5%和3.3%。然而，交换成像板上两堆幻像的位置会带来进一步的误差，表明需要更完整的系统均匀性校正。最后，一个初步的乳房图像分别提出了每个成分室。结论：FFDCM已被推导出来，并且在幻相上具有良好的成分厚度精度。初步的乳房图像证明了在临床环境中创建个人合成诊断图像的可行性。(C) 2010年美国医学物理学家协会。(DOI: 10.1118/1.3259715)
Purpose: Mammography has a low sensitivity in dense breasts due to low contrast between malignant and normal tissue confounded by the predominant water density of the breast. Water is found in both adipose and fibroglandular tissue and constitutes most of the mass of a breast. However, significant protein mass is mainly found in the fibroglandular tissue where most cancers originate. If the protein compartment in a mammogram could be imaged without the influence of water, the sensitivity and specificity of the mammogram may be improved. This article describes a novel approach to dual-energy mammography, full-field digital compositional mammography (FFDCM), which can independently image the three compositional components of breast tissue: water, lipid, and protein.Methods: Dual-energy attenuation and breast shape measures are used together to solve for the three compositional thicknesses. Dual-energy measurements were performed on breast-mimicking phantoms using a full-field digital mammography unit. The phantoms were made of materials shown to have similar x-ray attenuation properties of the compositional compartments. They were made of two main stacks of thicknesses around 2 and 4 cm. Twenty-six thickness and composition combinations were used to derive the compositional calibration using a least-squares fitting approach.Results: Very high accuracy was achieved with a simple cubic fitting function with root mean square errors of 0.023, 0.011, and 0.012 cm for the water, lipid, and protein thicknesses, respectively. The repeatability (percent coefficient of variation) of these measures was tested using sequential images and was found to be 0.5%, 0.5%, and 3.3% for water, lipid, and protein, respectively. However, swapping the location of the two stacks of the phantom on the imaging plate introduced further errors showing the need for more complete system uniformity corrections. Finally, a preliminary breast image is presented of each of the compositional compartments separately.Conclusions: FFDCM has been derived and exhibited good compositional thickness accuracy on phantoms. Preliminary breast images demonstrated the feasibility of creating individual compositional diagnostic images in a clinical environment. (C) 2010 American Association of Physicists in Medicine. [DOI: 10.1118/1.3259715]