Preliminary results of a Multi-Energy CT system for small animals

Abstract

The system makes use of a set of quasi-monochromatic X-ray beams, with energy tunable in a range from 26 to 72 keV. These beams are produced by Bragg diffraction on a Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite crystal. With quasi-monochromatic sources it is possible to perform multi-energy investigation in a more effective way, as compared with conventional X-ray tubes. Triple-energy projection allows to combine a set of three quasimonochromatic images of an object, in order to obtain a corresponding set of three single-tissue images, which are the mass-thickness map (product of density and thickness) of three reference materials. The triple-energy technique can be applied to the mass-thickness-map reconstruction of a contrast medium, because it is able to remove completely the signal due to other tissues (i.e. the structural background noise). Here, we present a description of the system and the methods for combining the images at the different energies. We also show some results of images acquired at three different energies and of the reconstructed information about the contrast medium (Iodine). We achieved that the measurement of the Iodine mass-thickness agrees very well with the known concentration of the injected Iodine solution.

Quantitative multi-energy micro-CT: A simulation and phantom study for simultaneous imaging of four different contrast materials using an energy integrating detector

“…Focusing on MECT using micro-CT, only a limited number of studies has been performed hitherto. Whereas in almost all studies micro-CT were equipped with highly specialized spectral detectors, photon counting detectors, or dedicated X-ray sources [ [38] , [39] , [40] , [41] , [42] , [43] ], to our best knowledge, no such MECT studies using a conventional micro-CT exist.…”

Multi-Material Decomposition Using Statistical Image Reconstruction for Spectral CT

“…Sukovic and Clinthorne [5] separated L 0 = 3 basis materials from M 0 = 3 sinograms acquired using M 0 = 3 distinct source voltages, one of which was near the K-edge of one basis material. Generally, spectral CT requires multiple scans or specialized scanner designs, such as quasi-monochromatic sources [33] or energy-resolved photon-counting detectors [34]. In this paper, we focus on MMD using DECT which is currently the only commerically available version of spectral CT.…”