Computer-Aided X-ray Imaging System Design and Evaluation

摘要

The use of x-ray imaging techniques, or radiography, as a diagnostic tool for scientific, industrial, and medical applications has increased appreciably in recent years. This increase is the result of new materials and state-of-the-art engineering techniques that have improved x-ray source design, shielding, and recording media. Radiography is now being used in many new applications where conventional optical photography traditionally has been limited or inappropriate. This new flexibility in x-ray imaging techniques has led to a broad latitude in the choice of radiographic system design that can be controlled to meet specific application needs. In many ways this design versatility is similar to that encountered when creating a specialized optical imaging system. Here image resolution and quality are optimized by undertaking analyses of geometrical parameters, ray-trace information, modulation transfer functions (MTFs), resolution grids, and image display or recording media, etc. This very flexibility in design, however, implies combining multiple components to create a complex system that contains many degrees of freedom. For conventional optical system design, this inherent complexity is overcome by using one of the computer design codes (for example, CODEV by Optical Research Associates). For the similar radiographic imaging problem, this paper discusses the x-ray image computer design code XRAD, which uses these same analysis techniques to optimize and predict the two-dimensional x-ray image of a three-dimensional object. 5 refs. (ERA citation 14:020221)