As most patients, for a given projection, contain regions of vastly different attenuation properties, the dose level is often far higher than is required for some regions and inadequate for others. In this paper, two practical issues pertaining to intensity modulated CT (IMCT) are demonstrated and their causes are theoretically derived. IMCT can be enabled using a number of various techniques. The use of a system of attenuating wedges, or dynamic beam attenuators (DBA) is considered here. The first practical issue is the presence of scatter radiation. It is shown that scatter radiation produces ring artifacts due to a mismatch in the frequency of the scatter and the DBA attenuation in the CT normalization procedure. The second practical issue concerns the generation of a uniform CNR image under different scanning geometries. It is shown that when the fluence incident on the detector is equalized, different system geometries propagate the noise differently (i.e. uniform noise projections do not correspond to uniform noise images for all scanning geometries). It is also shown that a simple data re-binning procedure (re-binning from one system geometry to another) can effectively mitigate this effect and allow for uniform noise images. In addition, a method to estimate the scatter signal is purposed that relies on assuming the scatter signal is equal on each side of individual DBA boundaries due to its low frequency nature.

Date Published: 3 March 2012
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 8313, Medical Imaging 2012: Physics of Medical Imaging, 83134E (3 March 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.911355

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8313:
Medical Imaging 2012: Physics of Medical Imaging
Norbert J. Pelc; Robert M. Nishikawa; Bruce R. Whiting, Editor(s)