Absolute measurement of effective atomic number and electron density using dual-energy computed tomography images

Abstract

The dual-energy computed tomography (CT) techniques can be adopted to separate the materials having similar Houndsfield Unit (HU) value such as tissues. In the technique, CT image values can be described as effective atomic number and electron density using the dual-energy equation. In this work, we measured effective atomic number and electron density using dual-energy CT images and assessed the image quality in vascular application. For the effective atomic number assessment, the measurements of a Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and water demonstrated small discrepancies of 3.28 % and 5.56 %, respectively. For electron density measurement, the experimental errors of PMMA and water were 7.83 % and 4.00 %, respectively. The trend obtained when comparing the HU values and absolute values such as effective atomic number and electron density demonstrates that the CNR of the HU values is higher than that of the absolute values such as effective atomic number and electron density. With contrast media having low concentration, it is remarkable that the effective atomic number image occasionally has higher CNR values than the HU images. In this study, small discrepancies between the experimental values and known values were obtained. The CNR values provided meaningful results for the absolute measurements in a dual-energy CT technique.