A Novel Static CT System: The Design of Triple Planes CT and Its Multi-Energy Simulation Results

Yidi Yao,Zhiqiang Chen,Liang Li

doi:10.3389/fphy.2021.632869

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel static CT system: triple planes CT (TPCT) system. Three source-detector planes in different horizontal directions are placed in the system. Line-array carbon nanotube sources with different voltages and sandwich detectors are used. Compared to conventional cone-beam CT and common inverse-geometry CT, the TPCT enables fast scanning and six-energy imaging. 1-D U-Net is applied to correct the severe scatter caused by the special geometry. The limited-view problem is solved by the hybrid reconstruction algorithm. A Monte-Carlo simulation is performed on a thorax phantom. Both the reconstruction results and decomposition results have good image quality and show the feasibility of our proposed TPCT imaging system.

Highlights

In recent years, technological advances in sources, detectors, electronics, and mechanics have driven the development of CT imaging [1, 2]
The triple planes CT (TPCT) results are almost consistent with the scattercorrected-FV results and similar to the scatter-free-FV results, which shows the feasibility of the TPCT imaging
The TPCT decomposition results are extremely similar to the scattercorrected-FV results, which show the hybrid reconstruction algorithm’s feasibility

Summary

Introduction

Technological advances in sources, detectors, electronics, and mechanics have driven the development of CT imaging [1, 2]. Improved spatial and temporal resolution, reduced patient dose, and artifacts, as well as multi-energy imaging, are being achieved [3]. Most of the progress is based on the third-generation CT. The scan duration is reduced to a few seconds, which eliminates the motion artifacts to a great extent. The single-rotation cardiac imaging requires at least 50 ms temporal resolution to avoid the artifacts introduced by heartbeat [5]. Current clinical gantry-based CT scanners have a rotation time of about 300 ms. The rotation time limit of the current CT system is about 200 ms due to mechanical structure limitation [5]

Methods

Results

Conclusion