Initial patient study with dedicated dual-modality SPECT-CT mammotomography

Dual-modality SPECT-CT dedicated breast imaging offers great promise in the detection/staging of cancer and the monitoring of treatment therapies. The sequential acquisition with emission (nuclear) and transmission (x-ray) 3D imaging systems can aid in localizing the radioactive uptake of a tumor from the emission image by using the anatomical structure from the transmission image as a roadmap. Both independent SPECT and CT subsystems are mounted onto a single gantry that rotates around the vertical axis of a pendant, uncompressed breast. To evaluate the feasibility of this dedicated system, geometric phantoms and breast phantoms using fiducial markers were acquired to study the sampling and resolution properties and demonstrate the fusion of the functional-anatomical images. In addition, a preliminary investigation on the clinical performance of the system was done by imaging two women with confirmed breast cancer: one on the independent SPECT system and the other on the SPECT-CT system. Further patient hybrid imaging studies are in progress. This compact dedicated SPECT-CT system is capable of non-invasively providing complementary functional and anatomical fully-3D activity distribution information of the breast, and has the potential to help further enhance the visual and quantitative information over the independent systems.