Hydrophilic crosslinked copolymers as tissue-equivalent materials for breast cancer detection

Crosslinked hydrophilic copolymers have the potential to be used as breast phantom materials because they can be made to have similar elemental composition to that of body soft tissues. The copolymer, which consists of a combination of hydrophobic monomers (methyl methacrylate [MMA]) and hydrophilic monomers (vinylpyrolidone [VP]), have all the required major elements, such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, found in tissues. Photon attenuation measurements were performed on the crosslinked hydrophilic copolymers in order to ascertain whether they are good representatives of breast tissues in the photon energy range of interest. The results of the measurements of transmission of photons by the hydrophilic copolymers at different discrete energies between 10 and 60 keV are presented.