Stereotactic Vacuum-Assisted Biopsy in Photon-Counting Dedicated Spiral Breast CT: A Proof of Concept

In recent years, a new dedicated spiral breast CT (SBCT) with photon-counting technology has been developed that offers clear advantages over established methods such as mammography and tomosynthesis, as well as the existing cone-beam breast CT (CBBCT) without a direct-conversion detector, particularly due to its unique feature of three-dimensional visualization of microcalcifications. Microcalcifications cannot be visualized using non-X-ray-based methods such as ultrasound and MRI. However, microcalcifications are particularly noticeable in 70% to 90% of DCIS cases 1 2 . Our experimental phantom study shows for the first time that the newly developed SBCT-compatible biopsy unit closes the previous diagnostic gap and enables both vacuum-assisted biopsy (VAB) and the marking of detected findings (especially microcalcifications and round foci) after precise three-dimensional target planning with the help of SBCT.