Soft-tissue differentiation and bone densitometry via energy-discriminating X-ray microCT

Abstract

X-ray computed tomography (CT) is an important diagnostic tool in medicine as well as being an essential research technique for animal imaging and bioscience. The key aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness, in both simulation and experiment, of differentiating soft tissue from bone as well as bone densitometry, using energy-discriminating X-ray detection. Polychromatic sources, such as standard X-ray tubes, can produce similar CT numbers for materials with different compositions, making differentiation and quantification of tissue and bone extremely challenging. In addition, ‘beam-hardening’ which occurs due to the relative increase in the attenuation of low energy photons compared..