AuntMinnie.com reported a team at Duke University Medical Center built a photon-counting detector breast CT scanner that could be useful for low-dose breast CT by separating the energy levels of different types of materials within the breast to assess tissue composition and improve cancer diagnosis. Additionally, it creates the possibility of spectroscopic acquisitions for differentiating malignant from benign tissue. The system was built from off-the-shelf parts and tested using phantoms containing plastic biological materials and could readily be incorporated into Duke’s existing dedicated breast SPECT/CT imaging system. The research is led by Dr. Martin Tornai (Radiology), who presented the work at ECR 2017.
