DEVELOPMENT OF PHANTOM FOR PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MICRO-CT

Abstract

Micro-X-ray computed tomography (micro-CT) has several characters such as non-invasive, high spatial resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio, providing three-dimensional volume information. Because micro-CT was utilized in many kinds of research field such as preclinical biomedical study, designing a performance phantom and developing analytic methods to objectively evaluate the performance of micro-CT are very important. In this study, the performance phantom and the analytic methods were developed for performance evaluation of micro-CT. The performance parameters extracted from different CT images including noise, linearity, spatial resolution, and hardware alignment were defined in the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) Report No. 1 and the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) E1695-95. Standard deviation, Pearson's correlation coefficient, edge response function, and visualization method were utilized to evaluate noise, linearity, spatial resolution, and hardware alignment, respectively. A digital uniform disk image was utilized to evaluate the accuracy of spatial resolution evaluation method. The physical phantom study was performed to evaluate a home-made micro-CT and a commercial micro-CT (Skyscan 1076). According to these results, the performance phantom and the analytic methods developed in this study have demonstrated their capability to evaluate performance of any micro-CT.