Multy Energy Digital Radiology

Abstract

The development of systems devoted to digital radiology yields great benefits as regards image manipulations, dose reduction, data storage and retrieval capabilities and so on. These advantages must convince even of the need of a better understanding of the image formation process and of a more powerful information extraction. In this sense these authors consider of major importance the work made in this decade by Macovski, Alvarez, Lehmann at alii on dual-energy radiology. This technique is based on the fact that, in the X-ray band of clinical interest, each material can be characterized, with excellent approximation, by only two characteristic parameter in so far its absorption coefficient is concerned. The development of this idea allows one, taking two radiographs of the same body and different voltages of the X-ray generator, to perform image manipulation of extreme interest, such as material identification, material cancellation (as an example, bones can be cancelled from the image through an appropriate algorithm) and other.