Amy Becker, a 1st year Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering under the mentorship of Dr. John Boone, was recently selected for the 2017 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Amy is interested in developing imaging methods that will lead to more accurate early diagnosis of breast cancer and ultimately higher survival rates.  She is currently using dedicated breast CT to create a physical simulation of a multisource cone beam CT scanner.  The goal of this project is to demonstrate the potential for a multiple x-ray source geometry to reduce artifacts and improve image quality in cone beam CT.  She will also investigate methods to quantitatively differentiate between malignant and benign breast lesions using contrast enhanced breast CT.  Biopsies are painful, time consuming, and costly.  Negative biopsies cause stress for those who ultimately don’t have cancer.  The goals of this project are to reduce the number of negative biopsies by excluding patients whose lesions are categorized as benign and to improve diagnostic accuracy overall by expanding the role of quantitative parameters in breast diagnostics.