Quantitative Acoustic Attenuation Scanning Using a Phase-Insensitive Ultrasound Computed Tomography System

False-positive indications in breast cancer screening cause pain and anxiety for patients and are a time and cost waste to healthcare systems. New quantitative ultrasound (QUS) scanners aim to measure intrinsic acoustic properties of soft tissues to aid better clinical decision-making. This study details the performance characterization of a novel phase-insensitive ultrasound computed tomography (Q-UCT) scanner, developed at U.K. National Physical Laboratory (NPL), for quantitative acoustic attenuation coefficient mapping of the breast. Scans of multiple commercially sourced anthropomorphic breast phantoms were acquired, with the results being compared to the X-ray computed tomography (XCT) imagery and ground-truth attenuation coefficients obtained from measurements of the constituent phantom materials. The novel system demonstrated the ability to detect the presence of inserts as small as 4 mm in diameter and measure the intrinsic attenuation of larger inserts and host materials with attenuation coefficients ranging from 0.7 to 4.1 dB cm-1 at 3.2 MHz. For the host materials, agreement with the ground-truth values of attenuation lies within the expanded measurement uncertainties of the ground-truth values.