A Parametric Physical Model Based X-ray Spectrum Estimation Approach for CT Imaging

X-ray spectrum plays an essential role in CT applications. Since it is difficult to measure x-ray spectrum directly in practice, x-ray spectrum is always indirectly obtained by using transmission measurements through a calibration phantom of known thickness and materials. These methods are independent of CT image reconstruction and bring extra cost. To solve this problem, we propose a parametric physical model based x-ray spectrum estimation algorithm for CT imaging. First, an x-ray spectrum model with six parameters is proposed, which is derived from the x-ray imaging physics. Second, a template image containing different material components can be obtained by segmenting CT reconstructed images with a simple method. And the estimated projections can be calculated by reprojecting the template image with the proposed spectrum model. Finally, the six model parameters can be solved by iteratively minimizing the error between the estimated projection and real measurements. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated on both simulated and real data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can estimate the accurate spectra at different energies and provide a good reconstruction of characteristic radiations without extra cost.