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Neutron stimulated emission computed tomography (NSECT) is being developed to noninvasively determine concentrations of trace elements in biological tissue. Studies have shown prominent differences in the trace element concentration of normal and malignant breast tissue. NSECT has the potential to detect these differences and diagnose malignancy with high accuracy with dose comparable to that of a single mammogram. In this study, NSECT imaging was simulated for normal and malignant human breast tissue samples to determine the significance of individual elements in determining malignancy. The normal and malignant models were designed with different elemental compositions, and each was scanned spectroscopically using a simulated 2.5 MeV neutron beam. The number of incident neutrons was varied from 0.5 million to 10 million neutrons. The resulting gamma spectra were evaluated through receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to determine which trace elements were prominent enough to be considered markers for breast cancer detection. Four elemental isotopes (133Cs, 81Br, 79Br, and 87Rb) at five energy levels were shown to be promising features for breast cancer detection with an area under the ROC curve (AZ) above 0.85. One of these elements—87Rb at 1338 keV—achieved perfect classification at 10 million incident neutrons and could be detected with as low as 3 million incident neutrons. Patient dose was calculated for each gamma spectrum obtained and was found to range from between 0.05 and 0.112 mSv depending on the number of neutrons. This simulation demonstrates that NSECT has the potential to noninvasively detect breast cancer through five prominent trace element energy levels, at dose levels comparable to other breast cancer screening techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to evaluate image similarity measures employed in an information-theoretic computer-assisted detection (IT-CAD) scheme. The scheme was developed for content-based retrieval and detection of masses in screening mammograms. The study is aimed toward an interactive clinical paradigm where physicians query the proposed IT-CAD scheme on mammographic locations that are either visually suspicious or indicated as suspicious by other cuing CAD systems. The IT-CAD scheme provides an evidence-based, second opinion for query mammographic locations using a knowledge database of mass and normal cases. In this study, eight entropy-based similarity measures were compared with respect to retrieval precision and detection accuracy using a database of 1820 mammographic regions of interest. The IT-CAD scheme was then validated on a separate database for false positive reduction of progressively more challenging visual cues generated by an existing, in-house mass detection system. The study showed that the image similarity measures fall into one of two categories; one category is better suited to the retrieval of semantically similar cases while the second is more effective with knowledge-based decisions regarding the presence of a true mass in the query location. In addition, the IT-CAD scheme yielded a substantial reduction in false-positive detections while maintaining high detection rate for malignant masses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]