Comparison of rectangular and dual-planar positron emission mammography scanners

Breast imaging using dedicated positron emission tomography (PEM) has gained much interest in the medical imaging field. In this paper, we compare the performance between rectangular PEM and parallel dual-planar PEM. Both designs are studied with DOI detectors (detectors capable of measuring the depth of interaction) and non-DOI detectors. We compare the Fisher information matrix, lesion detectability using a prewhitening observer, and quantitation of the four systems. Results show that the rectangular system with DOI has the highest signal-to-noise ratio for lesion detection and the lowest bias for quantitation for any given noise level. It also shows that for small lesions the parallel dual-planar system with DOI detectors outperforms the rectangular system with non-DOI detectors, while the rectangular system with non-DOI detectors can outperform parallel dual-planar system with DOI detectors for large lesions. This indicates that a high detector resolution is essential for small lesions, while complete sampling may be more important for large lesions.