The accuracy of an estimating method for the mammary gland composition in the mammography using the CdTe-series photon counting detector

Abstract

We propose a method for estimating mammary gland composition and report the examined results to find the better conditions to improve the precision of the estimation. We use a cadmium telluride series (CdTe-series) detector as a photon-counting mammography detector in this study, since CdTe-series detectors detect photons in a wide energy range and provide highly accurate energy discrimination. An imaging system using a CdTe-series detector is simulated by MATLAB. We divide the spectrum of an X-ray, which is transmitted a phantom, into three energy bins and calculate the corresponding linear attenuation coefficients from the numbers of input and output photons. These linear attenuation coefficients are plotted in a three-dimensional (3D) scatter plot. Using this 3D scatter plot, we estimate the mammary gland composition and determine the optimal conditions to estimate.