Practical energy response estimation of photon counting detectors for spectral X-ray imaging

Abstract

Spectral X-ray imaging is a promising technique to drastically improve the diagnostic quality of radiography and computed tomography (CT), since it enables material decomposition and/or identification based on the energy dependency of material-specific X-ray attenuation. Unlike the charge-integration based X-ray detectors, photon counting X-ray detectors (PCXDs) can discriminate the energies of incident X-ray photons and thereby multi-energy images can be obtained in single exposure. However, the measured data are not accurate since the spectra of incident X-rays are distorted according to the energy response function (ERF) of a PCXD. Thus ERF should be properly estimated in advance for accurate spectral imaging. This paper presents a simple method for ERF estimation based on a polychromatic X-ray source that is widely used for medical imaging. The method consists of three steps: source spectra measurement, detector spectra reconstruction, and ERF inverse estimation. Real spectra of an X-ray tube are first measured at all kVs by using an X-ray spectrometer. The corresponding detector spectra are obtained by threshold scans. The ERF is then estimated by solving the inverse problem. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the concept of the proposed method.