Journal Article

Quantitative dual-energy micro-CT with a photon-counting detector for material science and non-destructive testing

Sellerer, Thorsten, Noël, Peter B., Pfeiffer, Franz, Epple, Michael, Duda, Manuela, Ehn, Sebastian, Mechlem, Korbinian

2019

Overview

The recent progress in photon-counting detector technology using high-Z semiconductor sensors provides new possibilities for spectral x-ray imaging. The benefits of the approach to extract spectral information directly from measurements in the projection domain are very advantageous for material science studies with x-rays as polychromatic artifacts like beam-hardening are handled properly. Since related methods require accurate knowledge of all energy-dependent system parameters, we utilize an adapted semi-empirical model, which relies on a simple calibration procedure. The method enables a projection-based decomposition of photon-counting raw-data into basis material projections. The objective of this paper is to investigate the method's performance applied to x-ray micro-CT with special focus on applications in material science and non-destructive testing. Projection-based dual-energy micro-CT is shown to be of good quantitative accuracy regarding material properties such as electron densities and effective atomic numbers. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approach strongly reduces beam-hardening artifacts and improves image contrast at constant measurement time.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Algorithms / Bioengineering / Biology and Life Sciences / Calibration / CAT scans / Computed tomography / Decomposition / Destructive testing / Detection equipment / Electron density / Electrons / Empirical models / Energy / Engineering and Technology / Equipment and supplies / Equipment Design / Forecasting / Fourier transforms / Hardening / Health physics / Image contrast / Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Information processing / Material properties / Materials handling / Materials Science / Materials testing / Medical imaging / Medicine and Health Sciences / Methods / Models, Theoretical / Noise / Nondestructive testing / Phantoms, Imaging / Photon detectors / Photons / Physical Sciences / Physics / Radiography / Reproducibility of Results / Research and Analysis Methods / Retirement benefits / Sensors / Signal processing / Technology / X ray imagery / X-Ray Microtomography - instrumentation / X-Ray Microtomography - methods / X-rays