Optimal selection of base materials for accurate dual-energy computed tomography: Comparison between the alvarez-macovski METHOD and DIRA

Abstract

The choice of the material base to which the material decomposition is performed in dual-energy computed tomography may affect the quality of reconstructed images. The aim of this work is to investigate how the commonly used bases (water, bone), (water, iodine) and (photoelectric effect, Compton scattering) affect the reconstructed linear attenuation coefficient in the case of the Alvarez-Macovski method. The performance of this method is also compared with the performance of the Dual-energy Iterative Reconstruction Algorithm (DIRA). In both cases, the study is performed using simulations. The results show that the Alvarez-Macovski method produced artefacts when iodine was present in the phantom together with human tissues since this method can only work with one doublet. It was shown that these artefacts could be avoided with DIRA using the (water, bone) doublet for tissues and the (water, iodine) doublet for the iodine solution.