Detection performance study for cone-beam differential phase contrast CT

X-ray phase sensitive imaging methods have seen tremendous growth and increased interest in recent years. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, but all have shown the ability to improve the detection of various objects because of the additional phase measurements. Of the various methods, grating-based differential phase contrast computed tomography (DPC-CT) imaging has shown greater quantitative and diagnostic capabilities than traditional absorption CT. Although it has been shown that DPC-CT provides superior contrast of certain materials, one question has not been fully addressed to date is whether DPC-CT can provide improved accuracy in detecting low contrast masses using the same radiation dose as that given in absorption CT. The detectability is not only related to contrast to noise ratio, but also to the noise texture. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the peculiar noise texture found in cone-beam DPC-CT affects low contrast objects' detectability through human observer ROC analysis. Studies for both axial and sagittal planes were carried out, as both could potentially be used in clinical practice for a 3D image. The results demonstrate that noise texture found in conebeam DPC-CT strongly affects human visual perception, and that object detectabilities in axial and sagittal images of DPC-CT are different.