A balanced, filterless, K-edge energy window multilayer detector for dual energy computed tomography

摘要

Ross (or balanced) filter-based systems have been studied extensively in the past, however they have only recently been studied for medical applications such as computed tomography and contrast-enhanced mammography. Balanced filters are filters composed of different materials which have thicknesses designed to match the attenuation for all radiation energies except those within a certain energy window (between the K-edges of the filter materials). Images obtained using different filters to attenuate the incident x-rays can be subtracted to obtain an image which contains information solely within the energy window. The disadvantage of this image acquisition method is the requirement of a separate exposure for each filter. This can lead to motion artifacts in the resulting image for example due to cardiac, respiratory, or patient movement. In this paper we investigate a filterless, multilayer detector design using the general concept of balanced filters. In the proposed detector, energy discrimination is achieved using stacked layers of different conversion materials. Similar to how the thicknesses of balanced filters are chosen, the thicknesses of the conversion layers are designed to match the attenuation of x-rays except between the K-edges of the conversion materials. Motion artifacts are suppressed in the final image due to the simultaneous acquisition of images on all layers during a single exposure. The proposed multilayer design can be used for a number of applications depending on the energy range of interest. To study the proposed design, we consider dual energy computed tomography (CT) using a gadolinium-based contrast agent.