Self-collimating Single Photon Emission Breast Tomography System with Three-Dimensional Sparse Position-Sensitive Detectors

项目摘要 乳腺癌是美国女性中诊断最多的癌症，预计 到2021年成为全球最常见的癌症。为了最大限度地减少疾病的发病率和死亡率 对于这种疾病，必须制定改进的检测方法，使之更加有效 治疗。 拟议的工作是开发一种新的单光子发射乳房断层扫描(SPEBT) 扫描仪进行基于放射性核素示踪剂的分子乳腺成像，已证明 在临床试验中早期发现癌症恶性肿瘤方面的明显优势，因为它1) 检测在形态发生之前发生的病理功能变化的能力 解剖学的发展和2)高达皮摩尔的敏感性，这源于收集信号 直接在分子水平上。 SPEBT系统将具有3.5×10-2的系统探测效率和空间分辨率 2毫米，这比最先进的专用单光子分别好50倍和2倍 分别发射分子乳房成像相机。卓越的成像性能 改进将缓解现有对辐射剂量和无法检测到肿瘤的担忧 小于5毫米的尺寸-这些问题阻碍了分子乳房成像 在临床乳腺癌诊断和筛查中的作用更加突出。 SPEBT高性能背后的使能概念是一种新型探测器 架构，一种实现准直的三维稀疏位置敏感探测器 很大程度上是由自己和为自己，这被称为自准直。此架构允许SPEBT 实现了高分辨率和高检测效率。这是一个关键的概念突破 从机械准直器为主的探测器结构即单光子发射成像 技术依赖多年-机械准直器要求反向相互依赖 因此，在分辨率和检测效率之间设置了整体成像的硬上限 性能。建议的方法为获得更好的成像性能开辟了一条广阔的道路 乳房和其他成像应用。 建议的项目是设计和评估具有优化配置的SPEBT系统 并开发和测试概念验证SPEBT原型。

Project Summary Breast cancer is the most diagnosed cancer among American women and is projected to become the most common cancer globally in 2021. To minimize the morbidity and mortality of this disease, it is imperative to develop improved testing methods to enable more effective treatment. The proposed work is to develop a new Single Photon Emission Breast Tomography (SPEBT) scanner to carry out radionuclide tracer based molecular breast imaging which has demonstrated clear advantages in the early detection of cancer malignancy in clinical trials, because of its 1) capability to detect pathological functional changes which take place before morphological anatomical developments and 2) up-to pico-mole sensitivity, which stems from collecting signals directly at the molecular level. The SPEBT system will have a system detection efficiency of 3.5×10-2 and spatial resolution of 2-mm, which are 50 and 2 times better than that of state-of-the-art dedicated single photon emission molecular breast imaging cameras, respectively. The significant imaging performance improvement will ease existing concerns on radiation dose and the inability to detect tumors of less than 5-mm in size — issues that have prevented molecular breast imaging from playing a much more prominent role in clinical breast cancer diagnosis and screening. The enabling concept behind the high-performance of the SPEBT is a novel detector architecture, a three-dimensional sparse position-sensitive detector, that achieves collimation largely by and for itself, which is termed self-collimation. This architecture allows the SPEBT to achieve both high-resolution and high detection efficiency. This is a critical conceptual breakaway from the mechanical-collimator-based detector structure that single-photon emission imaging technology relies on for years — mechanical collimator mandates an inverse interdependency between the resolution and detection efficiency, therefore, sets a hard ceiling for overall imaging performance. The proposed approach opens up a broad path to better imaging performance for breast and other imaging applications. The proposed project is to design and evaluate a SPEBT system with optimized configurations and develop and test a proof-of-concept SPEBT prototype.