ABSTRACT
Cone-beam digital tomosynthesis (CBDT) has greatly been paid attention in the image-guided radiation therapy because of its attractive advantages such as low patient dose and less motion artifact. Image quality of tomograms is, however, dependent on the imaging conditions such as the scan angle (beta(scan)) and the number of projection views. In this paper, we describe the principle of CBDT based on filtered-backprojection technique and investigate the optimization of imaging conditions. As a system performance, we have defined the figure-of-merit with a combination of signal difference-to-noise ratio, artifact spread function and floating-point operations which determine the computational load of image reconstruction procedures. From the measurements of disc phantom, which mimics an impulse signal and thus their analyses, it is concluded that the image quality of tomograms obtained from CBDT is improved as the scan angle is wider than 60 degrees with a larger step scan angle (Delta beta). As a rule of thumb, the system performance is dependent on . If the exact weighting factors could be assigned to each image-quality metric, we would find the better quantitative imaging conditions.