This paper presents the modeling of breast tumor imaging process using wire mesh collimator gamma camera. Previous studies showed that the wire mesh collimator has a potential to improve the sensitivity of the tumor detection. In this paper, we extend our research significantly, to find an optimal configuration of the wire mesh collimator specifically for semi-compressed breast tumor detection, by looking into four major factors: weight, sensitivity, spatial resolution and tumor contrast. The numbers of layers in the wire mesh collimator is varied to optimize the collimator design. The statistical variations of the results are studied by simulating multiple realizations for each experiment using different starting random numbers. All the simulation environments are modeled using Monte Carlo N-Particle Code (MCNP). The quality of the detection is measured directly by comparing the sensitivity, spatial resolution and tumor contrast of the images produced by the wire mesh collimator and benchmarked that with a standard multihole collimator. The proposed optimal configuration of the wire mesh collimator is optimized by selecting the number of layers in wire mesh collimator, where the tumor contrast shows a relatively comparable value to the multihole collimator, when it is tested with uniformly semi-compressed breast phantom. The wire mesh collimator showed higher number of sensitivity because of its loose arrangement while the spatial resolution of wire mesh collimator does not shows much different compared to the multihole collimator. With a relatively good tumor contrast and spatial resolution, and increased in sensitivity, a new proposed wire mesh collimator gives a significant improvement in the wire mesh collimator design for breast cancer imaging process. The proposed collimator configuration is reduced to 44.09% from the total multihole collimator weight.
This paper presents the preliminary results of the new Low Energy High Resolution wire-mesh collimator gamma camera in mapping breast cancer cells, by employing 140 keV photons of Technetium-99 m radionuclide tracer. The complete model of photons propagation and detection, as well as the human cells activities are simulated using Monte Carlo N-Particle code. Abnormal cells of different tumor to background values are investigated, and the results from the conventional collimator and wire-mesh collimator are compared.The results are evaluated in terms of the collimator sensitivity and the contrast to background ratio. In our assessment, the wire mesh collimator gamma camera yields slightly better results than the multihole collimator for sensitivity, however produces insignificant performance in the contrast to background evaluation.Index Terms-Breast cancer, Monte Carlo, wire mesh collimator.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.