A Stationary Digital Breast Tomosynthesis Scanner

A prototype stationary digital breast tomosynthesis (s-DBT) system has been developed by retrofitting a Hologic Selenia Dimension rotating gantry tomosynthesis scanner with a spatially distributed carbon nanotube (CNT) x-ray source array. The goal is to improve the system spatial resolution by removing the x-ray tube motion induced focal spot blurring. The CNT x-ray source array comprises 31 individually addressable x-ray beams covering 30 angular span. Each x-ray beam has a minimum focal spot size of 0.64x0.61mm (full-width-at-half-maximum), a stationary W anode operating up to 50kVp, and 1mm thick Al filter. The flux from each beam is regulated and varied using dedicated control electronics. The maximum tube current is determined by the heat load of the stationary anode and depends on the energy, pulse width and the focal spot size used. Stable operation at 28kVp, 27mA tube current, 250msec pulse width and 38mA tube current, 183msec pulse width per exposure was achieved with extended lifetime. The standard ACR phantom was imaged and analyzed to evaluate the image quality. The actual scanning speed depends on the number of views and the readout time of the x-ray detector. With the present detector, 6 second scanning time at either 15 views or 31 views can be achieved at 100mAs total imaging dose with a detector readout time of 240msec.