Feasibility of a Novel Gamma Radiography Mammo System

Each Medical Imaging system has features that are more suitable to be used in certain medical situations than other systems. This motivates the continuous development of imaging systems with better features and fewer drawbacks. Some of the drawbacks are related to the radiation energy. For instance, X-ray is widely used in many imaging modalities such as CT, fluoroscopy and mammography. The ability to control the beam energy is a process shared among all X-ray modalities, because X-ray is produced as a spectrum that includes undesired low and high energy photons. The low energy photons produced will not give useful diagnostic information and will contribute in unnecessary radiation dose to the patient. The high energy photons will contribute to the decrease in image contrast [1]. This shortcoming is minimized by using certain types of filters [2]. In addition; X-Ray imaging systems are electronically complicated and require a high voltage generator to produce the beam as well as continuous maintenance. These drawbacks may be overcome by the use of gamma radiation instead of X-ray. Unlike X-ray, gamma radiation doesn’t require a generator or an electronically complicated system to produce the mono-energetic beam. These features of gamma radiation are advantageous in certain rough environments [3] recently; gamma was used in several studies to produce clinically acceptable radiographic medical images. These studies suggested that better quality images could be obtained with the use of proper activity, an image enhancement system, and the use of a scattering removal technique [4,5]. The main difference between mammography and conventional radiology is the useful energy range. Breast contains several soft tissues that have very similar attenuation properties. The attenuation difference between these soft tissues is higher at lower energies (10-15 keV) and becomes lower at higher energies (>35 keV) [2]. This means that the main challenges to utilizing gamma in mammography lies in finding a source that produced energy within or close enough to the mammography range. In this paper, gamma feasibility in mammography will be studied through simulation. Simulation will help determine under what conditions gamma radiation should be considered feasible in mammography. The determination of these conditions will enable finding proper radioactive sources to be used in gamma mammography. The simulation will be carried out using GATE package. GATE is a GEANT4 application Abstract