Cancer Lesions Detectability Limits in the SPECT Breast Imaging

Breast imaging for early stage cancer diagnosis is still mainly relying on planar imaging techniques. Due to spatial resolution and sensitivity limitations in combination with absorption effects, whole-body PET and SPECT clinical scanners show a poor performance in three-dimensional tomographic imaging. In order to exercise in detail the detectability limits of small breast cancer lesions in a highly noisy background, a dedicated SPECT study with a breast phantom is presented in this work. The practical goal of the current analysis is to accurately define the tomographic limits of this method to successfully deliver accurate clinical tomographic images of various small-volume and specific activity concentrations in a controllable Signal-to-Noise environment.