Theoretical characterization of performance effectiveness of photon-counting technique for digital radiography applications

Abstract

Photon-counting (PC) technique has been paid attention to digital radiography applications due to its potential in lowdose operation and multi-energy imaging capability. In this study, we theoretically investigate the performance gain in digital radiography when the PC detectors are used instead of the conventional energy-integrating (EI) detectors. We use the Monte Carlo technique for estimating energy-absorption distributions in detector materials such as CdTe for the PC detector and CsI for the EI detector. To estimate the signal and noise transfers through the two different detectoroperation schemes, we use the cascaded linear-systems approach. In the Monte Carlo simulations, the square and rectangle focal spots are considered to mimic the advanced carbon nanotube (CNT) and conventional filament cathodes, respectively. From the simulation results, the modulation-transfer functions of the PC detector are more sensitive to asymmetric focal spot geometry than those of the EI detector. On the other hand, the PC detector shows better image signal-to-noise ratio than the EI detector; hence better dose efficiency with the PC detector. The dose efficiency of the PC detector in comparison with the EI detector is however marginal for the filament x-ray beam whereas the dose efficiency is not negligible for the CNT x-ray beam. The theoretical upper limits of the imaging performance of the advanced digital radiography technology are reported in this study.