The purpose of this work is to demonstrate an ultra-fast reconstruction technique for digital tomosynthesis (DTS) imaging based on the algorithm proposed by Feldkamp, Davis, and Kress (FDK) using standard general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) programming interface. To this end, the FDK-based DTS algorithm was programmed "in-house" with C language with utilization of 1) GPU and 2) central processing unit (CPU) cards. The GPU card consisted of 480 processing cores (2 3 240 dual chip) with 1,242 MHz processing clock speed and 1,792 MB memory space. In terms of CPU hardware, we used 2.68 GHz clock speed, 12.0 GB DDR3 RAM, on a 64-bit OS. The performance of proposed algorithm was tested on twenty-five patient cases (5 lung, 5 liver, 10 prostate, and 5 head-and-neck) scanned either with a full-fan or half-fan mode on our cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) system. For the full-fan scans, the projections from 157.5°-202.5° (45°-scan) were used to reconstruct coronal DTS slices, whereas for the half-fan scans, the projections from both 157.5°-202.5° and 337.5°-22.5° (2 3 45°-scan) were used to reconstruct larger FOV coronal DTS slices. For this study, we chose 45°-scan angle that contained ~80 projections for the full-fan and ~160 projections with 2 3 45°-scan angle for the half-fan mode, each with 1024 3 768 pixels with 32-bit precision. Absolute pixel value differences, profiles, and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) calculations were performed to compare and evaluate the images reconstructed using GPU-and CPU-based implementations. The time dependence on the reconstruction volume was also tested with (512 3 512) 3 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 slices. In the end, the GPU-based implementation achieved, at most, 1.3 and 2.5 seconds to complete full reconstruction of 512 3 512 3 256 volume, for the full-fan and half-fan modes, respectively. In turn, this meant that our implementation can process 13 projections-persecond (pps) and 18 pps for the full-fan and half-fan modes, respectively. Since commercial CBCT system nominally acquires 11 pps (with 1 gantry-revolution-per-minute), our GPU-based implementation is sufficient to handle the incoming projections data as they are acquired and reconstruct the entire volume immediately after completing the scan. In addition, on increasing the number of slices (hence volume) to be reconstructed from 16 to 256, only minimal increases in reconstruction time were observed for the GPU-based implementation where from 0.73 to 1.27 seconds and 1.42 to 2.47 seconds increase were observed for the full-fan and half-fan modes, respectively. This resulted in speed improvement of up to 87 times compared with the CPU-based implementation (for 256 slices case), with visually identical images and small pixel-value discrepancies ( 6.3%), and CNR differences ( 2.3%).With this achievement, we have shown that time allocation for DTS image reconstruction is virtually eliminated and that clinical implementation of this approach has become quite appealing. In addition, with the speed achievemen...
We report the measurement results of signal and noise characteristics induced by the direct x-rays in an indirect-conversion CMOS photodiode array detector. In order to isolate the signal and noise due to the direct x-rays from those due to the optical photons, we inserted a light-absorbing blackout material between a phosphor screen and the photodiode array. From the images irradiated with and without the blackout paper, the signal and noise characteristics due to the optical photons emitted from a phosphor screen were estimated. For the analysis of the measurements, we have developed a model describing the signal and noise transfers based on the cascaded linear-systems approach. The measured results show the direct x-ray is very harmful to the detector performances, such noise power spectrum (NPS) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, from the theoretical estimation, the degradation of NPS and SNR would not be due to the directly absorbed x-ray photons, but we believe that other sources, such as Compton and photoelectric scattered rays from a scintillator, a photodiode passivation layer or bulk substrate, are main causes.Index Terms-Cascaded system analysis, image quality, noise power spectrum, radiography.
Flexible scintillators for digital x-ray image sensors were designed, fabricated and characterized. In these scintillaotrs, terbium-doped gadolinium oxysulfide (Gd 2 O 2 S:Tb) scintillator pixels were embedded into a polyethylene (PE) substrate. To evaluate the difference in the spatial resolution according to the pixel size, we designed three scintillators with pixels of different pitch sizes: 50 μm pitch size (P50), 100 μm pitch size (P100) and 200 μm pitch size (P200). Because of the high flexibility and good formability, polyethylene was used as the substrate of the scintillator. To fabricate nickel micromolds with high-aspect-ratio microstructures, two microfabrication techniques were employed: silicon dry-etching using a deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) process and nickel electroforming. The pixelated PE microstructures were fabricated by a hot embossing process. Because the solution-type Gd 2 O 2 S:Tb precursor can be handled at room temperature, Gd 2 O 2 S:Tb was used as the scintillator material. The measured sensitivities of the P50 and P100 models were, respectively, about 65% and 97% of that of the P200 model. The lower sensitivity values of the models with a small pitch size were due to two factors, such as the different pixel heights and the different fill factors. Because a scintillator with a small pixel size has a low fill factor, the sensitivity of the scintillator decreases as the pixel size decreases. The fill factors of the P50, P100 and P200 models were 36%, 49% and 56.25%, respectively. On the other hand, the spatial resolution of the scintillator increases as the pixel size decreases. Therefore, P50 gave the best spatial resolution among the designed models. The spatial frequency at 10% of the modulation transfer function (MTF) with P50 was 13.5 mm −1 , while that with P200 was 10.0 mm −1 . The resolution pattern and the tooth x-ray images obtained from a scintillator with a smaller pixel size was also clearer than that obtained from a scintillator with a larger pixel size. PE-based flexible Gd 2 O 2 S:Tb scintillators can be utilized directly in flexible x-ray image sensors.
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