AEC for scanning digital mammography based on variation of scan velocity

A theoretical evaluation of nonuniform x-ray field distributions in mammography was conducted. An automatic exposure control (AEC) is proposed for a scanning full field digital mammography system. It uses information from the leading part of the detector to vary the scan velocity dynamically, thus creating a nonuniform x-ray field in the scan direction. Nonuniform radiation fields were also created by numerically optimizing the scan velocity profile to each breast's transmission distribution, with constraints on velocity and acceleration. The goal of the proposed AEC is to produce constant pixel signal-to-noise ratio throughout the image. The target pixel SNR for each image could be set based on the breast thickness, breast composition, and the beam quality as to achieve the same contrast-to-noise ratio between images for structures of interest. The results are quantified in terms of reduction in entrance surface air kerma (ESAK) and scan time relative to a uniform x-ray field. The theoretical evaluation was performed on a set of 266 mammograms. The performance of the different methods to create nonuniform fields decreased with increased detector width, from 18% to 11% in terms of ESAK reduction and from 30% to 25% in terms of scan time reduction for the proposed AEC and detector widths from 10 to 60 mm. Some correlation was found between compressed breast thickness and the projected breast area onto the image field. This translated into an increase of the ESAK and decrease of the scan time reduction with breast thickness. Ideally a nonuniform field in two dimensions could reduce the entrance dose by 39% on average, whereas a field nonuniform in only the scanning dimension ideally yields a 20% reduction. A benefit with the proposed AEC is that the risk of underexposing the densest region of the breast can be virtually eliminated.