**An Innovative Concept of 3D X-Ray Imaging Systems for Painless Breast Cancer Detection for Painless Breast Cancer Detection**

**An Innovative Concept of 3D X-Ray Imaging Systems** 

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.70385

Mohammed Ali Alnafea Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Mohammed Ali Alnafea

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.70385

#### **Abstract**

Breast cancer is a life-threatening disease and considered one of the most common forms of cancer among women worldwide. Early and accurate detection with mass screening programmes helps improve a woman's chances for successful treatment. The current and the most effective technique used for screening and diagnosis of breast cancer is the X-ray mammography. The photon transport detection of such technique is mostly based on a forward scattering mechanism as well as makes use of attenuation and penetration coefficients. The painful compression and the double X-ray exposure of both patients' breasts carried out during the imaging process remain unavoidable. In addition, the conventional 2D mammography has two major limitations: sensitivity in detecting breast cancers (~ <80%) and the high recall rate (~10%). It suffers from certain limitations, most important of which is tissue overlap and false diagnoses arising thereof. To overcome this and as an alternative, a new 3D imaging method for breast cancer screening and diagnosis, namely, tomosynthesis, has recently been used. In such method, a limited number of low-dose 2D projection images of a patient are used to reconstruct the 3D tissue information. Tomosynthesis systems incorporate an X-ray source that moves over a certain angle to acquire images. This tube motion is a major limitation because it degrades image quality, increases the scan time and causes prolonged patient discomfort. Therefore, the goal of this work was to overcome all of the above limitations by developing an innovative proof of concept for painless 3D X-ray mammography to be hopefully used as a screening and as diagnostic methods for breast cancer detection by utilizing the scattered X-ray photon information. Most imaging modalities required a wide spectrum of capabilities, which span biomedical sciences, physical sciences and clinical medicine; thus, the ongoing methodology aims to establish a collaborative cross-disciplinary research engaging together with scientists in universities and clinicians in hospitals. Consequently, we hope that this work provides the potential to score some successes in clinical imaging science. In order to do this and since it is generally not possible or feasible to use real components to build and optimize a system repeatedly, a Monte Carlo simulation was used. The first phase focused on realistic computer simulation of the proposed imaging system to find the optimum setup as well as to aid in the analysis of the effect of various factors on the system performance. Thus, the main

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

focus was on 3D mammography imaging simulation setup. Five main steps have been carefully checked and successfully produced: (a) the production of X-ray radiation or source after careful and detailed physics check. This includes the interaction between the X-ray photons and the object (the 3D breast phantom) that is used on scan as well as the detector system and its associated electronics modelled. (b) Next is the realistic modelling of anthropomorphic breast phantoms to check if the effectiveness of prediction of the simulation is successfully achieved. A computer simulation model is developed to estimate the radiation dose to the breast that would be incurred using mammography. Mono-energetic normalized glandular dose coefficients, DgN(E), were computed for energies 11–120 keV using breast phantoms of various sizes and compositions.

**Keywords:** mammography, breast cancer detection, 3D imaging
