Journal
PHYSICS IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY
Volume 65, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1361-6560/ab78bf
Keywords
Time-of-flight computed tomography; photon counting computed tomography; scatter contribution; scatter noise; scatter rejection; pulsed x-rays; Cone-beam computed tomography
Funding
- NSERC
- FRQNT
- Calcul Quebec
- RBIQ R Fontaine's Canada Research Chair
- European Commisssion through the TICAL ERC grant [338953]
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Computed tomography has greatly improved over the last decade, especially through x-ray dose exposure reduction while maintaining image quality. Herein, a new concept is proposed to improve the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) by including the time-of-flight (TOF) information of individual photons to obtain further insight on the photon's trajectory and to reject scatter contribution. The proof of the concept relies on both simulation and experimental measurements in a cone-beam computed tomography arrangement. Results show a statistical difference between the TOF of scattered and primary photons exploitable in TOF computed tomography. For a large volume of the size of a human abdomen, a scatter reduction from 296% to 4% is achieved in our simulation setup with perfect timing measurements which yields a 110% better CNR, or a dose reduction by a factor of four. Cup artifacts are also reduced from 24.7% to 0.8%, and attenuation inaccuracies are improved from -26.3% to -0.8%. With 100 ps and 10 ps FWHM timing jitters, respectively 75% and 95% of the scatter contribution can be removed with marginal gains below 10 ps. Experimental measurements confirm the feasibility of measuring statistical differences between the TOF of scattered and primary photons.
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