Chirp phantom for MTF calculations. A study of its precision in noisy environments

Bar pattern phantoms are used to determine the maximum number of line-pairs per mm that an imaging system can resolve. In some cases, a numerical determination of the modulation transfer function (MTF) can also be carried out. However, calculations can only be performed in a relatively small number of frequencies because of the small number of bar groups in the phantom. In this work, a new bar pattern phantom has been simulated. This phantom consists of 66 pairs of lines of different periods and these periods vary exponentially with spatial position, like in a chirp wave. An oversampling procedure has been implemented to obtain the pre-sampled MTF of the system and the results obtained have been compared with those obtained with the edge method, recommended by the IEC. Monte Carlo simulations were carried out for three different levels of noise aimed at investigating the effect of noise on the uncertainties of the MTF determination. In addition, using the analytic expressions for the MTF calculation, statistical fluctuations of noise in phantom images were propagated to MTF values. Despite the smaller size of the chirp phantom, uncertainties in the chirp method are smaller than those of the edge method. For the edge image, the standard deviation of the MTF is proportional to the frequency f, whereas for the chirp method it is proportional to its square root. It is shown that applying an oversampling method allows the use of a single line pair per period without compromising the precision in noisy environments.