Evidence Hub

Advanced Methods in Molecular Breast Imaging

Ashley T. Tao

MacSphere (McMaster University), 2016

1 citation

Abstract

Molecular breast imaging (MBI) is a relatively new clinical breast imaging modality, which has the potential to have a significant impact in breast cancer screening and perioperative breast imaging for women with high risk factors for developing breast cancer. Two objectives were proposed in this thesis to increase the use of MBI. First, a magnetic resonance (MR)-compatible gamma camera was developed for combined molecular/MR breast imaging. MBI is a functional imaging technique with high specificity and sensitivity but could benefit from the addition of anatomical information from breast MRI for lesion localization, cancer staging, treatment planning and monitoring. A small area (8cm x 8cm) cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) based gamma camera was developed and tested for MR compatibility in both sequential and simultaneous imaging conditions. Results indicated that the gamma camera was minimally affected during both sequential and simultaneous imaging with a gradient echo (GRE) and spoiled gradient echo (GRE) sequence. Signal to noise ratio (SNR) degradation was observed in the MR images but no geometric distortions were observed. Simultaneous imaging is feasible, but a reassessment of the RF shielding would be required to minimize the noise contribution degrading image quality. Second, backscatter photons were investigated as a potential dose reduction technique for MBI. While the effective dose from MBI is relatively low in comparison to other nuclear medicine procedures, the…

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free