A material decomposition method for dual energy micro-CT
The attenuation of x-rays in matter is dependent on the energy of the x-rays and the atomic composition of the matter. Attenuation measurements at multiple x-ray energies can be used to improve the identification of materials. We present a method to estimate the fractional composition of three materials in an object from x-ray CT measurements at two different energies. The energies can be collected from measurements from a single source-detector system at two points in time, or from a dual source-detector system at one point in time. This method sets up a linear system of equations from the measurements and finds the solution through a geometric construction of the inverse matrix equation. This method enables the estimation of the blood fraction within a region of living tissue in which blood containing an iodinated contrast agent is mixed with two other materials. We verified this method using x-ray CT simulations implemented in MATLAB, investigated the parameters needed to optimize the estimation, and then applied the method to a mouse model of lung cancer. A direct application of this method is the estimation of blood fraction in lung tumors in preclinical studies. This work was performed at the Duke Center for In Vivo Microscopy, an NCRR/NCI National Resource (P41 RR005959/U24 CA092656), and also supported by NCI R21 CA124584. ©2009 SPIE.
