Phase-Contrast Clinical Breast CT: Optimization of Imaging Setups and Reconstruction Workflows

We present the outcomes of combined feasibility studies carried out at Elettra and Australian Synchrotron to evaluate novel protocols for three-dimensional (3D) mammographic phase contrast imaging. A custom designed plastic phantom and some tissue samples have been studied at diverse resolution scales and experimental conditions. Several computed tomography (CT) reconstruction algorithms with different pre-processing and post-processing steps have been considered. Special attention was paid to the effect of phase retrieval on the diagnostic value of the reconstructed images. The images were quantitatively evaluated using objective quality indices in comparison with subjective assessments performed by three experienced radiologists and one pathologist. We show that the propagation-based phase-contrast imaging (PBI) leads to substantial improvement to the contrast-to-noise and to the intrinsic quality of the reconstructed CT images compared with conventional techniques as well as to an important reduction of the delivered doses, thus opening the way to clinical implementations.