Dose and detectability for a cone-beam C-arm CT system revisited.
OBJECTIVE
The authors had previously published measurements of the detectability of disk-shaped contrast objects in images obtained from a C-arm CT system. A simple approach based on Rose's criterion was used to scale the date, assuming the threshold for the smallest diameter detected should be inversely proportional to (dose)1/2. A more detailed analysis based on recent theoretical modeling of C-arm CT images is presented in this work.


METHODS
The signal and noise propagations in a C-arm based CT system have been formulated by other authors using cascaded systems analysis. They established a relationship between detectability and the noise equivalent quanta. Based on this model, the authors obtained a relation between x-ray dose and the diameter of the smallest disks detected. A closed form solution was established by assuming no rebinning and no resampling of data, with low additive noise and using a ramp filter. For the case when no such assumptions were made, a numerically calculated solution using previously reported imaging and reconstruction parameters was obtained. The detection probabilities for a range of dose and kVp values had been measured previously. These probabilities were normalized to a single dose of 56.6 mGy using the Rose-criteria-based relation to obtain a universal curve. Normalizations based on the new numerically calculated relationship were compared to the measured results.


RESULTS
The theoretical and numerical calculations have similar results and predict the detected diameter size to be inversely proportional to (dose)1/3 and (dose)1/2.8, respectively. The normalized experimental curves and the associated universal plot using the new relation were not significantly different from those obtained using the Rose-criterion-based normalization.


CONCLUSIONS
From numerical simulations, the authors found that the diameter of detected disks depends inversely on the cube root of the dose. For observer studies for disks larger than 4 mm, the cube root as well as square root relations appear to give similar results when used for normalization.
Department of Radiology, Lucas MRS Center, Stanford University, 1201 Welch Road, Palo Alto, California 94305, USA. aganguly@stanford.edu
Arundhuti
A
Ganguly
Sungwon
S
Yoon
Rebecca
R
Fahrig
D054893:Cone-Beam Computed Tomography / Q000379:methods*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011829:Radiation Dosage