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Investigation of noise sources for digital radiography systems

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Abstract

The performance of digital radiography systems can be evaluated in terms of spatial resolution and noise. Noise plays an important role in the achievable image quality for detecting small and low-contrast structures in digital images created by these systems. Our aim in this study was to investigate the noise sources both in the spatial and frequency domain for three digital radiography systems, one digital fluoroscopy system, and one digital mammography system, and to obtain information about the effective operating dose range of these detectors. Noise evaluation in the spatial domain was done with the relative standard deviation–detector air kerma relationship evaluation method. The characterization of the noise in the spatial domain gives information about the types of noise, but does not give information about the noise power distribution in frequency space. Therefore, noise evaluation in the frequency domain was carried out by noise power spectrum measurement. The observed dominant noise component at lower detector doses was electronic noise for the digital mammography system, whereas structured noise was observed to make up nearly half of the total noise at higher detector doses for one of the digital radiography systems. The structured noise component was increased by use of a grid in these systems, independent of the grid ratio and grid frequency, but this increase was lower for higher grid frequencies. Furthermore, the structured noise coefficient was decreased with gain and offset calibrations. The five systems which we evaluated behaved as a quantum noise limited for clinically used detector doses.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by a TUBITAK 112T965 Research Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medical Physics, Institute of Nuclear Sciences, Ankara University, 06100, Tandogan, Ankara, Turkey

    Lutfi Ergun

  2. Department of Physics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Ankara University, 06100, Tandogan, Ankara, Turkey

    Turan Olgar

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  1. Lutfi Ergun
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  2. Turan Olgar
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Correspondence to Turan Olgar.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Ergun, L., Olgar, T. Investigation of noise sources for digital radiography systems. Radiol Phys Technol 10, 171–179 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12194-016-0381-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12194-016-0381-2

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