A Prototype of Cone-Beam Breast Computed Tomography System and its Performance Evaluation

The mammography has the problem of overlapping of cancer symptoms with normal tissue structures. A cone-beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) may partially solve this problem. One cone-beam breast CT (CBBCT) prototype has built up successfully and the primary performance evaluations have been done. All components including the X-ray tube, rotation stage and flat detector are connected together and controlled by one software developed by us base on National Instrument Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW). Based on the data acquired using the present prototype, the 3-D images are reconstructed using the FDK algorithm accelerated by GPU. The primary performance evaluations have been carried out using the breast phantom and animal model. The results demonstrate our system is effective and accurate.