Dedicated Breast CT: Current Status and New Directions

Cone-beam dedicated breast CT scanners have been developed to provide 3D images of the breast with sub millimeter isotropic resolution, no breast compression, and dose equivalent to mammography. This article will first review the system design and hardware components used in dedicated breast CT, followed by a review of scanner performance and image quality investigations. Proposed reconstruction algorithms will be discussed and the results from clinical trials presented. Promising new directions in breast CT, such as multi-modality, volume of interest, and multi-energy imaging, will be described. The paper will also discuss the challenges of breast CT including anatomical coverage and image management.