Detective quantum efficiency dependence on x-ray energy weighting in mammography

An evaluation of the dependence of detective quantum efficiency (DQE) on the incident energy spectrum has been made for mammography. The DQE dependence on the energy spectrum has been evaluated for energy-integrating detectors, photon-counting detectors, and detectors that measure the energy of each photon. To isolate the effect of the x-ray energy spectrum the detector has been assumed to be ideal, i.e., all noise sources are assumed to be zero except for quantum fluctuations. The result shows that the improvement in DQE, if the energy-integrating detector is compared to a single-photon counting detector, is of the order of 10%. Comparing the energy-integrating detector and the detector measuring the energy for each photon the improvement is around 30% using a molybdenum anode spectrum typical in mammography. It is shown that the optimal weight factors to combine the data in the case the energy is measured are very well approximated if the weight factors are proportional to E-3. Another conclusion is that in calculating the DQE, a detector should be compared to one that uses ideal energy weighting for each photon since this provides the best signal-to-noise ratio. This has generally been neglected in the literature. (C) 1999 American Association of Physicists in Medicine. [S0094-2405(99)01312-7].