Medical Physics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Medical Physics, including details on medicine, radiotherapy, biomechanics, medical imaging.

Basic setup for breast conductivity imaging using magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography.

Lee BI, Oh SH, Kim TS, Woo EJ, Lee SY, Kwon O, Seo JK

College of Electronics and Information, Kyung Hee University, Korea.

We present a new medical imaging technique for breast imaging, breast MREIT, in which magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT) is utilized to get high-resolution conductivity and current density images of the breast. In this work, we introduce the basic imaging setup of the breast MREIT technique with an investigation of four different imaging configurations of current-injection electrode positions and pathways through computer simulation studies. Utilizing the preliminary findings of a best breast MREIT configuration, additional numerical simulation studies have been carried out to validate breast MREIT at different levels of SNR. Finally, we have performed an experimental validation with a breast phantom on a 3.0 T MREIT system. The presented results strongly suggest that breast MREIT with careful imaging setups could be a potential imaging technique for human breast which may lead to early detection of breast cancer via improved differentiation of cancerous tissues in high-resolution conductivity images.

Published 5 January 2006 in Phys Med Biol, 51(2): 443-55.
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