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

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 sci...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Sellerer, Thorsten, Ehn, Sebastian, Mechlem, Korbinian, Duda, Manuela, Epple, Michael, Noël, Peter B., Pfeiffer, Franz
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6636745/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31314812
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219659
Descripción
Sumario: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.