Evaluation of Filling Materials for Breast Phantoms Using Texture Analysis

In this study, beeswax and paraffin were tested to represent the texture of mammographic phantoms. The aim is to identify the most appropriate filling material for developing a breast phantom by analyzing texture attributes using digital mammographic images. The methodology was divided in four main stages, starting with the development of the phantom, which involved developing experimental structures using a 3D printing with polylactic acid (PLA) as the base material. The structures were intended to be filled with beeswax and paraffin for texture analysis. The next step was the image acquisition, which was acquired using a clinical mammography system under standard conditions and eight regions of interest (ROIs) were manually segmented. In the third stage, radiomic texture features were extracted from the segmented ROIs using Haralick descriptors, skewness and kurtosis, calculated through Gray-Level Co-Occurrence matrix (GLCM) in MATLAB. Finally, the fourth stage involved statistical analysis, in which Gaussian curves were used to evaluate feature robustness across materials, and bar charts were applied to assess each attribute’s ability to distinguish between different internal regions of the phantom. It was concluded that the paraffin is the most indicated material, mainly due to its ability to simulate anatomical and pathological variability. This characteristic makes it more aligned with the objective of creating a configurable and accessible imaging simulator for clinical and research applications.