Noise correlation and its impact on the performance of multi-material decomposition-based spectral imaging in photon-counting CT.

The observation of noise correlation in 3-MD, 4-MD, and beyond (i.e., m-MD) is informative to the community. The relationship between noise correlation and the performance of spectral imaging revealed in this work may help clinical medical physicists understand the fundamentals of spectral imaging based on MD and optimize the performance of spectral imaging in photon-counting CT and other X-ray imaging modalities.