Quality assurance procedure for a gamma guided stereotactic breast biopsy system.

A quality assurance procedure has been developed for a prototype gamma-ray guided stereotactic biopsy system. The system consists of a compact small-field-of-view gamma-ray camera mounted to the rotational arm of a Lorad stereotactic biopsy system. The small-field-of-view gamma-ray camera has been developed for clinical applications where mammographic X-ray localization is not possible. Marker sources that can be imaged with the gamma-camera have been designed and built for quality assurance testing and to provide a fiducial reference mark. An algorithm for determining the three dimensional location of a region of interest, such as a lesion, relative to the fiducial mark has been implemented into the software control of the camera. This system can be used to determine the three-dimensional location of a region of interest from a stereo pair of images and that information can be used to guide a biopsy needle to that site. Point source phantom tests performed with the system have demonstrated that the camera can be used to localize a point of interest to within 1 mm, which is satisfactory for its use in needle localization.