title: Material discrimination based on K-edge characteristics.
abstract: Spectral/multienergy CT employing the state-of-the-art energy-discriminative photon-counting detector can identify absorption features in the multiple ranges of photon energies and has the potential to distinguish different materials based on K-edge characteristics. K-edge characteristics involve the sudden attenuation increase in the attenuation profile of a relatively high atomic number material. Hence, spectral CT can utilize material K-edge characteristics (sudden attenuation increase) to capture images in available energy bins (levels/windows) to distinguish different material components. In this paper, we propose an imaging model based on K-edge characteristics for maximum material discrimination with spectral CT. The wider the energy bin width is, the lower the noise level is, but the poorer the reconstructed image contrast is. Here, we introduce the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) criterion to optimize the energy bin width after the K-edge jump for the maximum CNR. In the simulation, we analyze the reconstructed image quality in different energy bins and demonstrate that our proposed optimization approach can maximize CNR between target region and background region in reconstructed image.
authors: The Key Lab of Optoelectronic Technology and Systems of the Education Ministry of China, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China ; The Key Lab of Biorheological Science and Technology of the Education Ministry of China, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China.
authors: Peng
authors: P
authors: He
authors: Biao
authors: B
authors: Wei
authors: Peng
authors: P
authors: Feng
authors: Mianyi
authors: M
authors: Chen
authors: Deling
authors: D
authors: Mi
mesh_terms: D003287:Contrast Media / Q000737:chemistry; D006801:Humans; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D017785:Photons; D011857:Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D013902:Radiography, Thoracic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
chemical_list: D003287:Contrast Media