Quality control in digital breast tomosynthesis: compliance of two phantoms with the EUREF protocol

Ever since the integration of Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) into breast cancer screening programmes, it has been a European endeavour to draw up standard guidelines for the assessment of the imaging performance of DBT systems. The quantitative evaluation of the quality of reconstructed tomosynthesis images is still an active area of research. In fact, the current version of the EUREF DBT QC protocol represents a preliminary set of guidelines to be used at acceptance, and to establish baseline values for constancy testing. New phantoms for QC in DBT have also been developed. Together, Sun Nuclear's Mammo 3D Performance Kits and CIRS DBT QC Phantom, model 021, have been shown to provide adequate test objects and background material for the assessment of the Automatic Exposure Control system performance, image receptor response function and noise analysis, system sharpness measured in projection images, and in-plane and out-of-plane spatial resolution in the reconstructed tomosynthesis image. From the comparison with the available literature, the use of the two phantoms with the Hologic Selenia Dimensions and Fujifilm AMULET Innovality systems has been validated.