Sci‐Fri PM Imaging‐04: Physical Characterization of a High‐resolution 16‐bit CCD Detector for Mammography

Abstract

We are evaluating the performance of a charge‐coupled device (CCD) detector for digital mammography. The detector is an array of four 1 × 5 cm CCD's coupled (without demagnification) through a fiber optic plate to a 180‐micron layer of Cesium Iodide. The detector has time‐delay integration electronics that enables it to be used in slot‐scanning full field digital mammography. With 27‐micron pixel pith, its resolution approaches that of film‐screen mammography (FSM). The detector also acquires 16‐bit data, which provides more contrast levels and facilitates imaging the edges of the breast. We measure the modulation transfer function, noise power spectrum and detective quantum efficiency in the scan and frame (detector stationary) modes. Our results show that the detector is capable of resolving information near its Nyquist frequency and has a DQE(0) approaching 50% in the scan mode. The DQE is higher than that of FSM cassettes and is comparable to other digital mammography detectors.

Evaluation of digital X-ray detectors for medical imaging applications

“…There are several commercial and scientific software packages available to calculate the MTF, NPS and DQE of digital x-ray detectors. A commercial available software package is JDQE (Elbakri, 2010) which is an ImageJ (Rasband, 1997(Rasband, -2011 plugin based on Elbakri's work on x-ray characterization of digital detectors (Elbakri et al, 2006, Elbakri et al, 2007and Elbakri et al, 2009. Two available software packages distributed to researchers and members of the scientific community are MIQuaELa (Ayala et al, 2009) which is a MATLAB-based GUI and OBJ_JQ_reduced (Marshall, 2009c) which is an IDL-based GUI based on Marshall's work (Marshall, 2006a, Marshall, 2006b, Marshall, 2007, Marshall, 2009aand Marshall, 2009b.…”