Characterization and applicability of low-density materials for making 3D physical anthropomorphic breast phantoms

Publication date: Available online 13 June 2019Source: Radiation Physics and ChemistryAuthor(s): J.C. Santos, C.D. Almeida, A. Iwahara, J.E. PeixotoAbstractTest objects or phantoms are important tools for the optimization of dose and image quality in mammography. The main quality control protocols in mammography adopt homogeneous phantoms for image quality assessment, which generate images with unrealistic uniform background and do not consider the effect of breast anatomy on image quality. Realistic three-dimensional (3D) anthropomorphic phantoms with characteristic contrast of breast tissues are required to better evaluate clinical systems in terms of their intended diagnostic tasks. This work aims to characterize low-density materials by determining their linear attenuation coefficients, μ(E), and to evaluate their suitability as breast tissue–equivalent materials for printing 3D anthropomorphic breast phantoms. Incident and transmitted mammographic X-ray spectra through different material thicknesses were measured using a CdTe detector. Attenuation curves were derived for each photon energy, and the coefficients μ(E) were calculated between 10 and 20 keV for various materials. These coefficients were compared with data for breast tissues (glandular, adipose, skin, and blood) presented in the literature. Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) was used as the reference material to validate the methodology used in this work. The experimental μ(E) for PMMA agreed with the resu...
Source: Radiation Physics and Chemistry - Category: Physics Source Type: research