Effect of focal spot distribution on blood vessel imaging in magnification radiography

From a computer simulation study of blood vessel imaging with uniform, triangular, gaussian, and twin gaussian line spread functions (LSF) corresponding to various focal spot distributions, it is found that vessel images magnified less than 6 times are not strongly dependent upon the focal spot distributions when the size of the focal spot is equal to or smaller than the vessel diameter. When the focal spot is larger than the vessel, image distributions vary appreciably with focal spot distributions, except at low magnification. It is concluded that, in many practical cases, the focal spot distribution does not seriously affect magnified image distributions of blood vessels.