Quantification of differences in the effective atomic numbers of healthy and cancerous tissues: A discussion in the context of diagnostics and dosimetry

Abstract

As dose calculation approaches improve in accuracy, there may be an argument for the explicit inclusion of pathologies. This is more the case for breast, penile, prostate, nasopharyngeal, and stomach cancer, less so for testicular and kidney cancer. The calculated data suggest dual-energy computed tomography could potentially improve lesion identification in the aforementioned organs (with the exception of testicular cancer), with most import in breast imaging. Ultimately, however, the differences are very small. It is likely that the assumption of a generic "tissue ramp" in planning will be sufficient for the foreseeable future, and that the Z differences do not notably aid lesion detection beyond that already facilitated by differences in mass density.

Utility of dual-layer spectral-detector CT imaging for predicting pathological tumor stages and histologic grades of colorectal adenocarcinoma

“…Eff-Z, which describes the nature of material or compound interactions with radiation (27,28), can discriminate and reflect the characteristics of material more accurately than attenuation in HU (29). The Eff-Z of cancerous tissue differs from healthy tissue because of the different trace element concentrations in tumor tissues (30). In most tumors, Eff-Z is consistently higher than healthy tissue, as verified by many studies (31, 32).…”

Radiation attenuatoin properties of human brain regions according to elemental composition in radiological energy range: A monte carlo simulation

“…The attenuation coefficient is basic fundamental photon interaction property of a material or human organ to investigate effective atomic number, effective electron density and shielding properties (Singh & Badier, 2016). The attenuation coefficients of various types of biological structures (cancerous and normal tissues) (Singh et al, 2015;Mirji et al, 2016;Tomal et al, 2010), body organs (Taylor, 2012), tissue substitutes have been investigated by different researchers. On the other hand, x-ray based medical imaging methods of the brain play vital role in the diagnostic process.…”

Measurement of absorption edge parameters near K edge for the compounds of Zn, Zr, Cd, Ba and Pb

“…To understand the chemical structure, physical and biological properties of a compound, the knowledge of effective atomic number (Z eff ) [25][26][27][28][29][30][31] of material is the most important parameter. Effective atomic number of some boron compounds and trammel sieve waste with a new computer program ZXCOM is given by Yalcin et al [32].…”