Photon-counting detector step-wedge calibration enabling water and iodine material decomposition

Abstract

Photon-counting detector computed tomography (PCD-CT) has demonstrated improvements in conventional image quality compared to energy integrating detector (EID) CT. PCD-CT has the advantage of being able to operate in conventional and spectral mode simultaneously by sorting photons according to selected energy thresholds. However, to reconstruct spectral images PCD-CT requires extensive calibration and specifically fine-tuning a spectral response. This response is then used to perform material decomposition (MD). We propose a step-wedge phantom made of water and iodine to calibrate a prototype PCD-CT system. Four methods were tested and compared based on calibration accuracy and CT image quality. The exhaustive PCD response was not well calibrated, but a reduced model was defined that was able to perform accurate water/iodine MD and to reduce the ring artifact intensity. The impact of the number of energy bins (from two to seven) was also studied. The number of bins did not affect the spectral accuracy. However, compared to the two energy bin configuration, the seven bin configuration decreased the noise by 10% and 15% in the water and iodine maps, respectively. The model was tested on ex-vivo tissue samples injected with iodine to demonstrate the results of the water/iodine MD on biological materials.