다층구조 엑스선 검출기를 이용한 이중에너지 조영제 영상의 물질 구분에 관한 연구

A Study on the Material Decomposition of Dual-Energy Iodine Image by Using the Multilayer X-ray Detector

Dual-energy X-ray imaging (DEI) techniques can provide X-ray images that a certain material is suppressed or emphasized by combining two X-ray images obtained from two different x-ray spectrum. In this paper, a single-shot DEI, which uses stacked two detectors (i.e., multilayer detector), is proposed to reduce the patient dose and increase throughput in angiography. The polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and aluminum (Al) were selected as two basis materials for material decomposition, and material-specific images are reconstructed as a vector combination of these two materials. We investigate the contrast and noise performance of material-decomposed images using iodine phantoms with various concentrations and diameters. The single-shot DEI shows comparable performances to the conventional dual-shot DEI. In particular, the single-shot DEI shows edge enhancement in material-decomposed images due to the different spatial-resolution characteristics of upper and lower detectors. This study could be useful for designing the multilayer detector including scintillators and energy-separation filter for angiography purposes.