Visualizing of Breast Blood Vessels via a Grating Interferometer with a Conventional X-ray Tube and no Contrast Medium

摘要

Grating-based phase-contrast imaging (GPCI) is a promising technique for phase-sensitive X-ray imaging in practical applications, such as the detection of invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) in breast cancer. It is crucial to focus on the blood vessels in breast, which contributes to determining the stage of IDC. In this work, we report an ex-vivo CT imaging study of blood vessels in a paraffin-fixed human breast specimen without any contrast medium, using a grating interferometer with a conventional X-ray tube. The projection images show that dark-field images can provide more detailed fine structures than attenuation and phase-contrast images, and that the formation of each vascular structure is clearly visible on the dark-field CT images by using the segmentation. Our preliminary results show that GPCI is of potential to improve the diagnosis of breast cancer, especially for IDC patients.