Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology - Volume 24, issue 6

Authors: Wang, Yingmei | Wang, Ge | Mao, Shuwei | Cong, Wenxiang | Ji, Zhilong | Cai, Jian-Feng | Ye, Yangbo

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Reducing radiation dose is an important goal in medical computed tomography (CT), for which interior tomography is an effective approach. There have been interior reconstruction algorithms for monochromatic CT, but in reality, X-ray sources are polychromatic. Using a polychromatic acquisition model and motivated by framelet-based image processing algorithms, in this paper, we propose an interior reconstruction algorithm to obtain an image with spectral information assuming only one scan with a current energy-integrating detector. This algorithm is a new nonlinear iterative method by minimizing a special functional under a polychromatic acquisition model for X-ray CT, where the attenuation coefficients are energy-dependent. …Experimental results validate that our algorithm can effectively reduce the beam-hardening artifacts and metal artifacts. It also produces color overlays which are useful in tumor identification and quantification. Show more

Keywords: Spectral interior CT, beam-hardening artifacts, maximum likelihood, soft thresholding, iterative reconstruction

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160586

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 771-785, 2016

Authors: Libin, E.E. | Chakhlov, S.V. | Trinca, D.

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: A new mathematical appoach using the inverse Radon equation for restoration of images in problems of linear two-dimensional x-ray tomography is formulated. In this approach, Fourier transformation is not used, and it gives the chance to create the practical computing algorithms having more reliable mathematical substantiation. Results of software implementation show that for especially for low number of projections, the described approach performs better than standard X-ray tomographic reconstruction algorithms.

Keywords: Optimization, Radon’s inversion equation, tomographic reconstruction, X-ray tomography

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160587

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 787-795, 2016

Authors: Pei, Cuixiang | Wu, Wenjing | Ueaska, Mitsuru

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The use of portable and high-energy X-ray system can provide a very promising approach for on-site nondestructive inspection of inner steel reinforcement of concrete structures. However, the noise properties and contrast of the radiographic images for thick concrete structures do often not meet the demands. To enhance the images, we present a simple and effective method for noise reduction based on a combined curvelet-wavelet transform and local contrast enhancement based on neighborhood operation. To investigate the performance of this method for our X-ray system, we have performed several experiments with using simulated and experimental data. With comparing to other traditional …methods, it shows that the proposed image enhancement method has a better performance and can significantly improve the inspection performance for reinforced concrete structures. Show more

Keywords: Concrete structure, nondestructive testing, X-ray inspection, image processing

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160588

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 797-805, 2016

Authors: Tang, Pei-Hua | Du, Ben-Jun | Fang, Xiang-Ming | Hu, Xiao-Yun | Qian, Ping-Yan | Gao, Quan-Sheng

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: PURPOSE: To assess the application value of submillisievert coronary CT angiography (CCTA) in patients with a high heart rate (HR) acquired with adaptive prospective ECG-triggered sequence acquisition and iterative reconstruction on the secondary generation dual-source CT. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 120 consecutive high-HR patients suspected with coronary artery disease underwent CCTA and invasive coronary angiography (ICA) within two weeks. Patients were randomly assigned into three groups: group A (n  = 40), where the patients underwent retrospectively ECG-triggered acquisition CCTA at 100 kVp; group B (n  = 40), where the patients received adaptive prospective ECG-triggered sequence acquisition at 100 kVp; …and group C (n  = 40), where the patients performed adaptive prospective ECG-triggered sequence acquisition at 80 kVp with iterative reconstruction. The mean CT values, signal noise ratios (SNR) and contrast noise ratios (CNR) in the ascending aorta and coronary arteries of the three groups were measured and compared. The image quality and radiation dose among the three groups were compared. The consistency of displaying the coronary stenosis of each group was assessed compared with the results of ICA as the gold standard. RESULTS: There was no significant difference in gender, age and body mass index (BMI) (all P  > 0.05). The mean attenuations, SNRs and CNRs in the ascending aorta and coronary artery were not significantly different between group A and group B (P  > 0.05). The mean attenuations of group C were significantly higher than group A and group B (P  < 0.01), but the image noise and CNR were significantly lower in group C (P  < 0.01). The number of appreciable segments among the three groups was not significantly different on a per-segment and per-vessel basis (P  > 0.05). The subjective image quality among the three groups was not significantly different (P  > 0.05). With the ICA result as a reference standard, there was good consistency in the evaluation of the coronary stenosis degree between CCTA and ICA (r  > 0.75), as well as in the assessment of the coronary stenosis rate using the Bland— Altman analysis. The mean radiation dose in group B was half of that in group A. Moreover, the mean radiation dose in group C was less than one sixth of that in group A and less than 1 mSv (0.7±0.2 mSv). CONCLUSIONS: For patients with high HR, adaptive prospective ECG-triggered sequence acquisition on the FLASH dual-source CT results in equal image quality and half of the radiation dose reduction compared with retrospectively ECG-triggered spiral acquisition at the same tube voltage (100 kVp) and same R-R interval of exposure. In addition, adaptive prospective ECG-triggered sequence acquisition combined with low tube voltage and iterative reconstruction can further reduce the radiation dose to the submillisievert level without compromising image quality and the accuracy of assessing the coronary stenosis degree, and can be popularized as a routine technique. Show more

Keywords: Dual-source computed tomography, coronary angiography, adaptive prospective ECG-triggering, iterative reconstruction, high heart rate, radiation dose

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160589

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 807-820, 2016

Authors: Chen, Mianyi | Yang, Qingsong | Cong, Wenxiang | Wei, Biao | Wang, Ge

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The Precision of geometric parameters is the key requirement for grating-based phase-contrast CT and attenuation-based CT in cone-beam geometry. By extending our fan-beam geometric calibration work via Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) into the cone-beam case, here we calibrate the geometric parameters of our in-house phase-contrast CT system with attenuation projection data. Numerical and experimental studies show that the LLE-based calibration method is feasible to calibrate 8 parameters of the cone-beam geometry that improves reconstruction quality significantly.

Keywords: Geometric calibration, cone-beam, locally linear embedding, phase-contrast CT

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160590

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 821-836, 2016

Authors: Tian, Xiumei | Zeng, Dong | Zhang, Shanli | Huang, Jing | Zhang, Hua | He, Ji | Lu, Lijun | Xi, Weiwen | Ma, Jianhua | Bian, Zhaoying

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Dynamic cerebral perfusion x-ray computed tomography (PCT) imaging has been advocated to quantitatively and qualitatively assess hemodynamic parameters in the diagnosis of acute stroke or chronic cerebrovascular diseases. However, the associated radiation dose is a significant concern to patients due to its dynamic scan protocol. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an image restoration method by utilizing coupled dictionary learning (CDL) scheme to yield clinically acceptable PCT images with low-dose data acquisition. Specifically, in the present CDL scheme, the 2D background information from the average of the baseline time frames of low-dose unenhanced CT images and the …3D enhancement information from normal-dose sequential cerebral PCT images are exploited to train the dictionary atoms respectively. After getting the two trained dictionaries, we couple them to represent the desired PCT images as spatio-temporal prior in objective function construction. Finally, the low-dose dynamic cerebral PCT images are restored by using a general DL image processing. To get a robust solution, the objective function is solved by using a modified dictionary learning based image restoration algorithm. The experimental results on clinical data show that the present method can yield more accurate kinetic enhanced details and diagnostic hemodynamic parameter maps than the state-of-the-art methods. Show more

Keywords: Low-dose, dynamic cerebral perfusion, computed tomography, dictionary learning, image restoration

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160593

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 837-853, 2016

Authors: Cao, Wuteng | Li, Fangqian | Gong, Jiaying | Liu, Dechao | Deng, Yanhong | Kang, Liang | Zhou, Zhiyang

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: To investigate the efficacy of liver acquisition with acceleration volume acquisition (LAVA) gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) sequences and to assess its added accuracy in diagnosing local recurrence (LR) of rectal cancer with conventional T2-weighted fast spin echo (FSE) sequences. Pelvic MRI, including T2-weighted FSE sequences, gadolinium-enhanced sequences of LAVA and T1-weighted FSE with fat suppression, was performed on 225 patients with postoperative rectal cancer. Two readers evaluated the presence of LR according to “T2” (T2 sequences only), “T2 + LAVA-Gad” (LAVA and T2 imaging), and “T2 + T1-fs-Gad” (T1 fat suppression-enhanced sequence with T2 images). To evaluate diagnostic efficiency, imaging …quality with LAVA and T1-fs-Gad by subjective scores and the signal intensity (SI) ratio. In the result, the SI ratio of LAVA was significantly higher than that of T1-fs-Gad (p  = 0.0001). The diagnostic efficiency of “T2 + LAVA-Gad” was better than that of “T2 + T1-fs-Gad” (p  = 0.0016 for Reader 1, p  = 0.0001 for Reader 2) and T2 imaging only (p  = 0.0001 for Reader 1; p  = 0.0001 for Reader 2). Therefore, LAVA gadolinium-enhanced MR increases the accuracy of diagnosis of LR from rectal cancer and could replace conventional T1 gadolinium-enhanced sequences in the postoperative pelvic follow-up of rectal cancer. Show more

Keywords: Rectal cancer, local recurrence, liver acquisition with acceleration volume acquisition, magnetic resonance imaging

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160594

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 855-863, 2016

Authors: He, Zhijie | Qiao, Quanbang | Li, Jun | Huang, Meiping | Zhu, Shouping | Huang, Liyu

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: BACKGROUND: The CT image reconstruction algorithm based compressed sensing (CS) can be formulated as an optimization problem that minimizes the total-variation (TV) term constrained by the data fidelity and image nonnegativity. There are a lot of solutions to this problem, but the computational efficiency and reconstructed image quality of these methods still need to be improved. OBJECTIVE: To investigate a faster and more accurate mathematical algorithm to settle TV term minimization problem of CT image reconstruction. METHOD: A Nesterov’s algorithm (NESTA) is a fast and accurate algorithm for solving TV minimization problem, which can be …ascribed to the use of most notably Nesterov’s smoothing technique and a subtle averaging of sequences of iterates, which has been shown to improve the convergence properties of standard gradient-descent algorithms. In order to demonstrate the superior performance of NESTA on computational efficiency and image quality, a comparison with Simultaneous Algebraic Reconstruction Technique-TV (SART-TV) and Split-Bregman (SpBr) algorithm is made using a digital phantom study and two physical phantom studies from highly undersampled projection measurements. RESULTS: With only 25% of conventional full-scan dose and, NESTA method reduces the average CT number error from 51.76HU to 9.98HU on Shepp-Logan phantom and reduces the average CT number error from 50.13HU to 0.32HU on Catphan 600 phantom. On an anthropomorphic head phantom, the average CT number error is reduced from 84.21HU to 1.01HU in the central uniform area. CONCLUSIONS: To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that apply the NESTA method into CT reconstruction based CS. Research shows that this method is of great potential, further studies and optimization are necessary. Show more

Keywords: Compressed sensing, total variation, NESTA, CT

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160597

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 865-874, 2016

Authors: Kuo, Chia-Chun | Chuang, Ho-Chiao | Teng, Kuan-Ting | Hsu, Hsiao-Yu | Tien, Der-Chi | Wu, Chih-Jen | Jeng, Shiu-Chen | Chiou, Jeng-Fong

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to develop an ultrasound image tracking algorithm (UITA) for extracting the exact displacement of internal organs caused by respiratory motion. The program can track organ displacements in real time, and analyze the displacement signals associated with organ displacements via a respiration compensating system (RCS). The ultrasound imaging system is noninvasive and has a high spatial resolution and a high frame rate (around 32 frames/s), which reduces the radiation doses that patients receive during computed tomography and X-ray observations. This allows for the continuous noninvasive observation and compensation of organ displacements simultaneously during a radiation …therapy session. This study designed a UITA for tracking the motion of a specific target, such as the human diaphragm. Simulated diaphragm motion driven by a respiration simulation system was observed with an ultrasound imaging system, and then the induced diaphragm displacements were calculated by our proposed UITA. These signals were used to adjust the gain of the RCS so that the amplitudes of the compensation signals were close to the target movements. The inclination angle of the ultrasound probe with respect to the surface of the abdomen affects the results of ultrasound image displacement tracking. Therefore, the displacement of the phantom was verified by a LINAC with different inclination-angle settings of the ultrasound probe. The experimental results indicate that the best inclination angle of the ultrasound probe is 40 degrees, since this results in the target displacement of the ultrasound images being close to the actual target motion. The displacement signals of the tracking phantom and the opposing displacement signals created by the RCS were compared to assess the positioning accuracy of our proposed ultrasound image tracking technique combined with the RCS. When the ultrasound probe was inclined by 40 degrees in simulated respiration experiments using sine waves, the correlation between the target displacement on the ultrasound images and the actual target displacement was around 97%, and all of the compensation rates exceeded 94% after activating the RCS. Furthermore, the diaphragm movements on the ultrasound images of three patients could be captured by our image tracking technique. The test results show that our algorithm could achieve precise point locking and tracking functions on the diaphragm. This study has demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed ultrasound image tracking technique combined with the RCS for compensating for organ displacements caused by respiratory motion. This study has shown that the proposed ultrasound image tracking technique combined with the RCS can provide real-time compensation of respiratory motion during radiation therapy, without increasing the overall treatment time. In addition, the system has modest space requirements and is easy to operate. Show more

Keywords: Ultrasound image, real-time image tracking, respiration compensating system

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160598

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 875-892, 2016

Authors: Ghoranneviss, M. | Shahidi, S. | Elahi, A. Salar

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: In this research, the cotton fabrics were treated with nitrogen plasma for the clinical and anti-bacterial purposes. Turmeric was used a as a natural dye. Some part of both untreated and plasma treated samples was immersed in silver nitrate as a mordant before dyeing. Effect of plasma and silver nitrate on dye ability of cotton samples was compared and studied. Samples were analyzed with different experimental methods, such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Reflection spectro-photometry and antibacterial test. Results showed that, turmeric dye have anti-bacterial efficiency and good antibacterial activity achieved by plasma treatment of fabrics. In case of AgNO3 …treatment, samples showed 100% antibacterial activity. It also concluded that, nitrogen plasma has synergic effect on antibacterial activity of turmeric as natural dye on cotton fabrics. Show more

Keywords: Plasma, anti-bacterial efficiency

DOI: 10.3233/XST-160599

Citation: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 893-900, 2016