Characterization of imaging performance in differential phase contrast CT compared with the conventional CT--noise...

The differential phase contrast CT is emerging as a new technology to improve the contrast sensitivity of the conventional CT. Via system analysis, modeling, and computer simulation, the authors study the noise power spectrum (NPS)--an imaging performance indicator-of the differential phase contrast CT and compare it with that of the conventional CT.

The differential phase contrast CT is implemented with x-ray tube and gratings. The x-ray propagation and data acquisition are modeled and simulated with Fourier analysis and Fresnel analysis. To avoid any interference caused by scatter and beam hardening, a monochromatic x-ray source (30 keV) is assumed, which irradiates the object to be imaged by 360 degrees so that no weighting scheme is needed. A 20-fold up-sampling is assumed to simulate x-ray beam's propagation through the gratings Gl and G2 with periods 8 and 4 microm, respectively, while the intergrating distance is 193.6 mm (1/16 of the Tabolt distance). The dimension of the detector cell for data acquisition ranges from 32 x 32 to 128 x 128 microm2, while the field of view in data acquisition is 40.96 x 40.96 mm2. A uniform water phantom with a diameter 37.68 mm is employed to study the NPS, with its complex refraction coefficient n = 1 - delta + ibeta = 1 - 2.5604 x 10(-7) + i1.2353 x 10(-10). The x-ray flux ranges from 10(6) to 10(8) photon/cm2.projection and observes the Poisson distribution, which is consistent with that of micro-CT in preclinical applications. The image matrix of reconstructed water phantom is 1280 x 1280, and a total of 180 regions at 128 x 128 matrix are used for NPS calculation via 2D Fourier Transform in which adequate zero padding is applied to avoid aliasing.

The preliminary data show that the differential phase contrast CT manifests its NPS with a l/|k| trait, while the distribution of the conventional CTs NPS observes |k|. This accounts for the significant difference in their noise granularity and the differential phase contrast CTs substantial advantage in noise over the conventional CT, particularly, in the situations where the detector cell size for data acquisition is smaller than 100 microm.

The differential phase contrast CT detects the projection of refractive coefficient's derivative and uses the Hilbert filter for image reconstruction, which leads to the radical difference in its NPS and the advantage in noise in comparison to that of the conventional CT.