Nuclear Science and Techniques

Abstract:

The measurement of electron density is important for medical diagnosis and charged particle radiotherapy treatment planning. Traditionally, electron density is obtained by CT imaging using the relationship between CT-number and electron densities established beforehand. However, the measurement is not accurate due to the beam hardening effect. In this paper, we propose a simple and practical electron density acquisition method based on dual-energy CT technique. For each sample, the CT imaging is conducted using two selected X-ray energy from synchrotron radiation. A post-processing dual-energy reconstruction method is used. Linear attenuation coefficients of the scanned samples are obtained by FBP reconstruction. The effective atomic number and electron density are got by solving the dual-energy simultaneous equations. Different phantoms and breast tissues were scanned in this experimental study under 10 keV and 30 keV monochromatic X-rays. The distribution of effective atomic numbers and electron densities of the scanned phantoms were obtained by Dual-energy CT image reconstruction, which agrees well with the theoretical values. Compared with conventional methods, the measurement accuracy is greatly improved, and the measurement error is reduced to about 1%. This experimental study demonstrates that DECT imaging based on synchrotron radiation source is applicable to medical diagnosis for quantitative measurement with high accuracy.

Key words: Dual-energy CT, Synchrotron radiation, Electron density, X-ray imaging