Real-Time Viewer for Positron Emission Mammography Guided Biopsy

PEM-guided biopsy is successful in localizing sub-centimeter lesions that cannot be seen by other modalities. To help the physician quickly visualize the position of an interventional device in relation to a lesion, we have developed a method to view PEM images in near real time, allowing visualization of lesion displacement within 30 seconds. Phantom and patient data were collected on a commercially available high-resolution, organ-specific PET scanner. The real-time display is realized by showing only one imaging plane and calculating the intersection point of each line of response through a plane where the lesion was targeted based on a prior diagnostic-quality scan. A variety of refresh and persistence times from 2 to 30 seconds were evaluated. In a phantom study both point source and line source movements were successfully visualized in real-time with a refresh time of two seconds and a persistence time of 10 to 15 seconds. Simulation based on real clinical data shows that the localization of lesions can be obtained almost real-time and even relatively faint lesions with a lesion to background ratio of 2:1 can be localized in 10 seconds.