Recently, we proposed a multi-step material decomposition method for spectral CT where the decomposition is solved in a series of steps each separating one new material from the original attenuation data. Until now, this method has only been tested using numerical simulations of multi-material digital phantoms. Here we present the initial results of the multistep method applied to experimental data acquired in our laboratory using a Medipix 3RX detector with a silicon senor. The decomposition of CT images of a 3-material phantom is demonstrated. The materials studied here are gadolinium (Gd), iodine (I) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic. The results show qualitative and quantitative improvement in separation accuracy as the worst-case percent error in one selected slice is reduced by 51.7% when using our new method in comparison to a conventional single-step material decomposition.
X-ray phase contrast imaging is being investigated with the goal of improving the contrast of soft tissue. Enhanced edges at material boundaries are characteristic of phase contrast images. These allow better retrieval of phase maps and attenuation maps when material properties are very close to each other. Previous observations have shown that the edge contrast of a target material reduces with increasing thickness of the surrounding bulk material. In order to accurately retrieve material properties, it is important to understand the contributions from various factors that may lead to this phase degradation. We investigate this edge degradation dependence due to beam hardening and object scatter that results from the surrounding bulk material. Our results suggest that the large propagation distances used in PB-PCI are effective at reducing the scatter influence. Rather, our results indicate that the phase contrast degradation due to beam hardening is the most critical. The ability to account for these variations may be necessary for more accurate phase retrievals using polychromatic sources and large objects.
Photon counting spectral detectors (PCD) are being investigated for multiple applications such as material decomposition and X-ray phase contrast imaging. Many available detectors have fairly larger pixel sizes of about 150 µm or larger. The imaging performance is ultimately influenced by the choice of the sensor material, pixel pitch, contact type (Ohmic or Schottkey), spectral distortions due to charge sharing and pulse pile up. Several performance aspects must be optimal including energy and spatial resolution, frequency response, temporal stability etc. to fully utilize the advantages of a PCD. For any given design, understanding the interplay of various compromising features in the detector is very important to maximize spectral capability of these detectors. In this work, we examine spatial frequency performance of a small pixel PCD such as Medipix3RX with CdTe sensors. Measurements were conducted in single pixel mode (SPM) with no charge sharing correction as well as with charge summing mode (CSM) with built in hardware based charge-sharing correction, for both fine pitch (55 µm) and spectroscopic (110 µm) modes. While most of the simulations and measurements in the past use monochromatic x-ray to investigate these spatio-energetic correlations, our work shows preliminary results on these complex correlations when a polychromatic beam is used.
X-Ray phase contrast imaging (PCI) is being developed as an alternative to overcome the poor contrast sensitivity of existing attenuation imaging techniques. The “phase sensitivity” can be achieved using a number of phase-enhancing geometries such as free space propagation, grating interferometry and edge illumination (also known as coded aperture) technique. The enhanced contrast in the projected intensities (that combine absorption and phase effect) can vary by object shape, size and its material properties as well as the particular PCI method used. We show a comparison of this signal enhancement for both FSP and coded aperture (CA) PCI. Our data shows that the phase enhancement is significantly higher for CA in comparison to FSP. Our preliminary results indicate that the enhanced phase effect decreases in all PCI techniques with increasing background thickness. Investigations involving signal location and background tissue thickness dependent signal enhancement (and/or loss of this signal) are very important in determining the true benefit of PCI methods in a practical application involving thick organs like breast imaging.
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