Performance evaluation of a sub-millimetre spectrally resolved CT system on high- and low-frequency imaging tasks: a...

We are developing a photon-counting silicon strip detector with 0.4 × 0.5 mm² detector elements for clinical CT applications. Except for the limited detection efficiency of approximately 0.8 for a spectrum of 80 kVp, the largest discrepancies from ideal spectral behaviour have been shown to be Compton interactions in the detector and electronic noise. Using the framework of cascaded system analysis, we reconstruct the 3D MTF and NPS of a silicon strip detector including the influence of scatter and charge sharing inside the detector. We compare the reconstructed noise and signal characteristics with a reconstructed 3D MTF and NPS of an ideal energy-integrating detector system with unity detection efficiency, no scatter or charge sharing inside the detector, unity presampling MTF and 1 × 1 mm² detector elements. The comparison is done by calculating the dose-normalized detectability index for some clinically relevant imaging tasks and spectra. This work demonstrates that although the detection efficiency of the silicon detector rapidly drops for the acceleration voltages encountered in clinical computed tomography practice, and despite the high fraction of Compton interactions due to the low atomic number, silicon detectors can perform on a par with ideal energy-integrating detectors for routine imaging tasks containing low-frequency components. For imaging tasks containing high-frequency components, the proposed silicon detector system can perform approximately 1.1-1.3 times better than a fully ideal energy-integrating system.