Kumari Maini, Sangeeta Maini; (2012) Development of a Breast Tissue Diffraction Analysis System using Energy Dispersive X-ray Diffraction. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Research groups have shown that diffraction techniques could be applied for characterising materials. In particular, Energy Dispersive X-ray Diffraction (EDXRD) technique has been successfully used in characterising materials such as plastics, drugs and biological tissues. The size of breast tissues used for characterisation so far has been small, in the range of mm. In order to exploit the fullness of the EDXRD technique in characterising breast tissues and hence enable early and precise breast tumour detection, the presented research work takes the existing research work a step forward by developing a breast tissue diffraction analysis system wherein breast-sized tissue-equivalent materials have been studied for tumour detection and an optimised EDXRD system for breast tissue analysis has been presented. For the development of this breast tissue analysis diffraction system, a ray-tracing model of the EDXRD system has been developed. The model has been used to predict diffraction spectra. These model predictions have been further used to optimize system parameters for an EDXRD system so it could be used for breastsized samples. Materials like plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and tissues have been characterised on this optimized system. The diffraction spectra collected have been used to build a diffraction spectrum database which has been further used to generate diffraction images for detection of tumour of size as small as 0.5 cm. Following this abstract, in the thesis, Chapter 1 introduces how X-rays interact with matter and what research groups have achieved so far in breast tissue diffraction. Ray-tracing model of EDXRD system forms Chapter 2 wherein the system parameters along with the corrections used in the model and model predictions have been presented. The characterisation of materials using optimized EDXRD system has been detailed in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 elaborates the generation of diffraction images. Chapter 5 presents the conclusions and suggests future work. The thesis ends with a list of references.

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