Detection of lung nodules in chest digital tomosynthesis (CDT): effects of the different angular dose distribution

Abstract

Chest digital tomosynthesis (CDT) is a recently introduced new imaging modality for better detection of high- and smallcontrast lung nodules compared to conventional X-ray radiography. In CDT system, several projection views need to be acquired with limited angular range. The acquisition of insufficient number of projection data can degrade the reconstructed image quality. This image degradation easily affected by acquisition parameters such as angular dose distribution, number of projection views and reconstruction algorithm. To investigate the imaging characteristics, we evaluated the impact of the angular dose distribution on image quality by simulation studies with Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission (GATE). We designed the different angular dose distribution conditions. The results showed that the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) improves when exposed the higher dose at central projection views than peripheral views. While it was found that increasing angular dose distribution at central views improved lung nodule detectability, although both peripheral regions slightly suffer from image noise due to low dose distribution. The improvements of CNR by using proposed image acquisition technique suggest possible directions for further improvement of CDT system for lung nodule detection with high quality imaging capabilities.