Physical and psychophysical characterization of a novel clinical system for digital mammography

Abstract

The novel clinical unit based on direct-conversion detector and optical reading presents great results in terms of both physical and psychophysical characterizations. The good spatial resolution, combined with excellent noise properties, allows the achievement of very good DQE, better than those published for clinical FFDM systems. The psychophysical analysis confirms the excellent behavior of the AMULET unit.

A new clinical unit for digital radiography based on a thick amorphous Selenium plate: Physical and psychophysical characterization

“…Note that, like most of the systems manufactured by FUJI-FILM, the system presents a logarithmic behavior for all four beams. 13,14 All the subsequent measurements (both physical and psychophysical characterization) were then performed on linearized images.…”

“…A similar effect on 2D spectra was already observed in other systems developed by FUJIFILM. 13,14 Hence, even if we do not have many details from the manufacturer, we believe that this filter was designed to remove banding non uniformities in one of the principal directions. The second point is that, similarly to most of the systems based on direct conversion detectors, the AcSelerate shows a nearly uniform noise across the entire range of frequencies.…”

Image simulation and a model of noise power spectra across a range of mammographic beam qualities

“…Various publications [12][13][14][15] have characterized noise for a range of detectors. However, most of the work published concentrates on the relationship between noise and dose rather than beam quality.…”

“…However, most of the work published concentrates on the relationship between noise and dose rather than beam quality. Such analysis has been undertaken using a simple measurement of noise such as variance 12,13 or using noise power spectra. 14,15 More information on the noise is gained by splitting the noise into different components.…”

Free software for performing physical analysis of systems for digital radiography and mammography

“…The outcomes of our plugin have already been used in various published papers for achieving the physical characterization of several computed and digital radiography systems both for general radiography and for digital mammography. [15][16][17][18][19] A brief user manual is also available on the aforementioned website (www.medphys.it/downloads.htm) for helping users in realizing the basic operations with the software ("COQ: an ImageJ plugin for the physical characterization and quality checks of digital detectors").…”