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 a rectangular geometry and a parallel dual-planar geometry. Both geometries are studied with depth of interaction (DOI) detectors and non-DOI detectors. We compare the Fisher-information matrix, lesion detection, and quantitation of the four systems. The lesion detectability is measured by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a prewhitening numerical observer for detecting a known hot spot on a uniform background. Results show that the rectangular system with DOI has the highest SNR for the detection task and the lowest bias at any given noise level for the quantitation task. They also show that for small simulated 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 the parallel dual-planar system with DOI detectors for large simulated lesions.