Statistical image-domain multi-material decomposition for dual-energy CT

摘要

PurposeDual-energy CT (DECT) enhances tissue characterization because of its basis material decomposition capability. In addition to conventional two-material decomposition from DECT measurements, multi-material decomposition (MMD) is required in many clinical applications. To solve the ill-posed problem of reconstructing multiple-material images from dual-energy measurements, additional constraints are incorporated into the formulation, including volume and mass conservation and the assumptions that at most three materials in each pixel and various material types among pixels. The recently proposed flexible image-domain MMD method decomposes pixels sequentially into multiple basis materials using direct inversion scheme and leads to magnified noise in the material images. In this paper, we propose a statistical image-domain MMD method for DECT to suppress the noise.