# Self-collimating Single Photon Emission Breast Tomography System with Three-Dimensional Sparse Position-Sensitive Detectors

> **NIH NIH R21** · STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO · 2024 · $160,833

## Abstract

Project Summary
 Breast cancer is the most diagnosed cancer among American women and is projected to
become the most common cancer globally in 2021. To minimize the morbidity and mortality of
this disease, it is imperative to develop improved testing methods to enable more effective
treatment.
 The proposed work is to develop a new Single Photon Emission Breast Tomography (SPEBT)
scanner to carry out radionuclide tracer based molecular breast imaging which has demonstrated
clear advantages in the early detection of cancer malignancy in clinical trials, because of its 1)
capability to detect pathological functional changes which take place before morphological
anatomical developments and 2) up-to pico-mole sensitivity, which stems from collecting signals
directly at the molecular level.
 The SPEBT system will have a system detection efficiency of 3.5×10-2 and spatial resolution
of 2-mm, which are 50 and 2 times better than that of state-of-the-art dedicated single photon
emission molecular breast imaging cameras, respectively. The significant imaging performance
improvement will ease existing concerns on radiation dose and the inability to detect tumors of
less than 5-mm in size — issues that have prevented molecular breast imaging from playing a
much more prominent role in clinical breast cancer diagnosis and screening.
 The enabling concept behind the high-performance of the SPEBT is a novel detector
architecture, a three-dimensional sparse position-sensitive detector, that achieves collimation
largely by and for itself, which is termed self-collimation. This architecture allows the SPEBT to
achieve both high-resolution and high detection efficiency. This is a critical conceptual breakaway
from the mechanical-collimator-based detector structure that single-photon emission imaging
technology relies on for years — mechanical collimator mandates an inverse interdependency
between the resolution and detection efficiency, therefore, sets a hard ceiling for overall imaging
performance. The proposed approach opens up a broad path to better imaging performance for
breast and other imaging applications.
 The proposed project is to design and evaluate a SPEBT system with optimized configurations
and develop and test a proof-of-concept SPEBT prototype.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10805488
- **Project number:** 5R21EB032993-03
- **Recipient organization:** STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO
- **Principal Investigator:** RUTAO YAO
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $160,833
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-06-01 → 2026-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10805488

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10805488, Self-collimating Single Photon Emission Breast Tomography System with Three-Dimensional Sparse Position-Sensitive Detectors (5R21EB032993-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10805488. Licensed CC0.

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