Evaluation of the Impact of X-ray Tube Voltage and Filter Thickness on the Performance of Spectral Photon-Counting Detectors

Abstract: During the past years photon-counting detectors (PCDs) have emerged as an alternative to conventional energy-integrating detectors and may significantly improve the standard of care for computed tomography (CT). There are two main alternatives for the material of the detector: cadmium telluride (CdTe) and silicon (Si). The settings of the X-ray tube and the applied filters need to be evaluated and optimized for the new detector technology. In this report, Monte Carlo simulations are used to determine how image quality is affected by different X-ray tube voltages and filter thicknesses. The image quality indicators that were chosen to evaluate are detective quantum efficiency (DQE) for material quantification and both DQE and dose-normalized signal-difference-to-noise ratio (SDNR) for detection tasks. Overall, silicon-based detectors performed better than cadmium-based detectors for quantification imaging tasks for all object thicknesses, while cadmium-based detectors were superior for detection imaging tasks in larger patients. For both silicon- and cadmium-based detectors, the dose-normalized image quality was largely independent of filter thickness, while the X-ray tube voltage had a more distinct impact on the result, where low voltages were optimal.