Voxelized breast phantoms for dosimetry in mammography

X-ray breast imaging techniques are an essential part of breast cancer screening programs and their improvements lead to gain in performance and accuracy. Radiation dose estimate and control play an important role in digital mammography and digital breast tomosynthesis investigations, since the risk of radioinduced cancer to the gland must be contained and dose delivered to the gland must be declared in the medical report. The actual dosimetric protocols suggest the assessment of radiation dose by means of Monte Carlo calculation on digital breast phantoms, providing the assumption of the homogeneous mixture of glandular and adipose tissues within the breast organ, leading to a drastic approximation. In line with the trend of other research groups, with the aim of improving the Monte Carlo model, in the current work a new heterogeneous digital breast model is proposed, involving a voxelized approach and disengaging from the concept of homogeneous phantom. The proposed model is based on new findings in the literature and after a validation process, the model is adopted to evaluate mean glandular dose discrepancies with the traditional model which is adopted in clinic for decades.