Image Qualities of Phase-Contrast Mammography

A digital full-filed mammography system using phase-contrast technique has been developed. The system consists of a dedicated mammography unit, a computed radiography unit with a sampling rate of 43.75 microns, and a photothermographic printer with a printing rate of 25 microns for photothermographic film with the maximum optical density of 4.0. The sharpness of the output image is improved with an edge effect due to phase contrast and magnification. The image noise is reduced by an air-gap method with no bucky. In this paper, the image qualities of the phase-contrast mammography are described for full-filed mammography and spot-compression at 1.5x magnification.

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