Development of a digital breast phantom for photoacoustic computed tomography

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging provides morphological and functional information about angiogenesis and thus is potentially suitable for breast cancer diagnosis. However, the development of PA breast imaging has been hindered by inadequate patients and a lack of ground truth images. Here, we report a digital breast phantom with realistic acoustic and optical properties, with which a digital PA-ultrasound imaging pipeline is developed to create a diverse pool of virtual patients with three types of masses: ductal carcinoma in situ, invasive breast cancer, and fibroadenoma. The experimental results demonstrate that our model is realistic, flexible, and can be potentially useful for accelerating the development of PA breast imaging technology. (c) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

A digital breast phantom with realistic acoustic and optical properties was developed for PA imaging, allowing the creation of virtual patients with different types of masses. Experimental results demonstrate that the model is realistic, flexible, and could potentially accelerate the development of PA breast imaging technology.