Markus Lendl

New technologies to reduce pediatric radiation doses

X-ray dose reduction in pediatrics is particularly important because babies and children are very sensitive to radiation exposure. We present new developments to further decrease pediatric patient dose. With the help of an advanced exposure control, a constant image quality can be maintained for all patient sizes, leading to dose savings for babies and children of up to 30%. Because objects of interest are quite small and the speed of motion is high in pediatric patients, short pulse widths down to 4 ms are important to reduce motion blurring artifacts. Further, a new noise-reduction algorithm is presented that detects and processes signal and noise in different frequency bands, generating smooth images without contrast loss. Finally, we introduce a super-resolution technique: two or more medical images, which are shifted against each other in a subpixel region, are combined to resolve structures smaller than the size of a single pixel. Advanced exposure control, short exposure times, noise reduction and super-resolution provide improved image quality, which can also be invested to save radiation exposure. All in all, the tools presented here offer a large potential to minimize the deterministic and stochastic risks of radiation exposure.

Optimized anti-scatter grids for flat panel detectors

Anti-scatter grids are well established in the field of X-ray projection imaging. In general these grids consist of a large number of parallel lead lamellae separated by X-ray-transparent material. This regular structure defines the characteristic grid frequency. Modern X-ray imaging systems apply digital receptors, i.e. image intensifiers coupled to a CCD camera or solid state flat-panel detector. Combining a digital detector and an anti-scatter grid may lead to Moire artifacts. This results from sampling an analog X-ray image with signal components higher than half the sampling frequency. Especially in high dose DSA images (Digital Subtraction Angiography) these irritating artifacts may be visible to the user. In this paper we present a concept for minimizing these grid artifacts: Signal propagation in the detector is modeled by three steps, scintillator MTF, aperture MTF, and sampling. Since the scintillator MTF is irrelevant for the grid optimization process, we focus on aperture MTF and sampling. From the given geometry of the detector elements the corresponding 2D Fourier transform is calculated. An evaluation for typical grid frequencies, i.e. arcs around the origin of the 2D Fourier transform, results in profiles exhibiting pronounced minima. From the respective angle values for these minima, grid orientation can be optimized for minimum Moire disturbances. Simulation results for typical detector pixel geometries and for grid frequencies used in practice are validated by measurement for two different anti-scatter grids on a Siemens angiographic system with a digital flat-panel detector.