Abstract:
A digital beam attenuator system has been developed to automatically generate patient-specific compensating filters for chest radiography. An initial low-dose test image is used to generate the attenuator, which is fabricated by overprinting multiple layers of a heavy-metal material onto a nonattenuating substrate. The attenuator is subsequently inserted into the X-ray beam for a final compensated radiograph. The effects of focal spot blurring and limited attenuator resolution result in the final compensated image containing only high-spatial frequency information. The frequency response of the process is not strictly describable by a modulation transfer function, but an approximation of the frequencies remaining in the compensated image is obtained for low-contrast conditions. It is found that a 4×4 blurring function on the original 64×64 test image is required for the attenuator to give appropriate compensated image appearance. A proposed attenuator printing scheme prints the attenuator in a 16×16 matrix, staggering successively printed layers to achieve the required 64×64 sampling with appropriate blurring. The resulting compensated image has good anatomical definition and contains a frequency response similar to that obtained by compensation techniques being investigated by Plewes and Sorenson
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