High resolution Mammography Sensor

描述（由申请人提供）：乳腺癌是美国女性癌症的主要原因。众所周知，如果在肿瘤较小且不累及腋窝淋巴结时检测到乳腺癌，则存活率非常高。然而，如果癌症随着时间的推移而扩散，存活率会显着下降。因此，乳腺肿瘤的早期检测对于成功治疗乳腺癌和显著减少乳腺钼靶X线检查（ACS，Shapiro，Tabar）至关重要。X射线乳房X线摄影术目前使用胶片-屏幕系统进行，虽然它在检测早期临床隐匿性乳腺癌（ACS，Kopans）方面取得了良好的成功，但胶片-屏幕检测器的宽容度和动态范围有限（Nishikawa）。它的性能也受到检测效率和空间分辨率之间的权衡的影响，这是由于在更厚的屏幕中增加了光的传播，而更厚的屏幕在阻止X射线方面更有效。鉴于这些局限性，我们计划探索一种用于乳房X光检查的新型数字成像探测器。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Breast carcinoma is the leading cause of cancer in women in the U.S. It is well known that if breast cancer is detected when the tumor is small and axillary nodes are not involved, the survival rate is very high. However, if the cancer has spread with time, the survival rate drops significantly. Early detection of breast tumors is therefore critical to the successful treatment of breast cancer and significant reduction in the breast mammography (ACS, Shapiro, Tabar). X-ray mammography is currently performed using a film-screen system and while it has shown good success in detecting early stage, clinically occult breast cancer (ACS, Kopans), the film-screen detector has limited latitude and dynamic range (Nishikawa.) Its performance is also affected by trade-off between detection efficiency and spatial resolution due to increased light spreading in thicker screens which are more efficient in stopping X-rays. In view of these limitations, we plan to explore a novel digital imaging detector for mammography.