ABSTRACT
Region-of-interest (ROI) fluoroscopy takes advantage of the fact that most neurovascular interventional activity is performed in only a small portion of an x-ray imaging field of view (FOV). The ROI beam filter is an attenuating material that reduces patient dose in the area peripheral to the object of interest. This project explores a method of moving the beam-attenuator aperture with the object of interest such that it always remains in the ROI. In this study, the ROI attenuator, which reduces the dose by 80% in the peripheral region, is mounted on a linear stage placed near the x-ray tube. Fluoroscopy is performed using the Microangiographic Fluoroscope (MAF) which is a high-resolution, CCD-based x-ray detector. A stainless-steel stent is selected as the object of interest, and is moved across the FOV and localized using an object-detection algorithm available in the IMAQ Vision package of LabVIEW. The ROI is moved to follow the stent motion. The pixel intensities are equalized in both FOV regions and an adaptive temporal filter dependent on the motion of the object of interest is implemented inside the ROI. With a temporal filter weight of 5% for the current image in the peripheral region, the SNR measured is 47.8. The weights inside the ROI vary between 10% and 33% with a measured SNR of 57.9 and 35.3 when the object is stationary and moving, respectively. This method allows patient dose reduction as well as maintenance of superior image quality in the ROI while tracking the object.
ABSTRACT
We demonstrate the capability of one detector, the Micro-Angiographic Fluoroscope (MAF) detector, to image for two types of applications: nuclear medicine imaging and radiography. The MAF has 1024 × 1024 pixels with an effective pixel size of 35 microns and is capable of real-time imaging at 30 fps. It has a CCD camera coupled by a fiber-optic taper to a light image intensifier (LII) viewing a 300-micron thick CsI phosphor. The large variable gain of the LII provides quantum-limited operation with little additive instrumentation noise and enables operation in both energy-integrating (EI) and sensitive low-exposure single photon counting (SPC) modes. We used the EI mode to take a radiograph, and the SPC mode to image a custom phantom filled with 1 mCi of I-125. The phantom is made of hot rods with diameters ranging from 0.9 mm to 2.3 mm. A 1 mm diameter parallel hole, medium energy gamma camera collimator was placed between the phantom and the MAF and was moved multiple times at equal intervals in random directions to eliminate the grid pattern corresponding to the collimator septa. Data was acquired at 20 fps. Two algorithms to localize the events were used: 1) simple threshold and 2) a weighted centroid method. Although all the hot rods could be clearly identified, the image generated with the simple threshold method shows more blurring than that with the weighted centroid method. With the diffuse cluster of pixels from each single detection event localized to a single pixel, the weighted centroid method shows improved spatial resolution. A radiograph of the phantom was taken with the same MAF in EI mode without the collimator. It shows clear structural details of the rods. Compared to the radiograph, the sharpness of the emission image is limited by the collimator resolution and could be improved by optimized collimator design. This study demonstrated that the same MAF detector can be used in both radioisotope and x-ray imaging, combining the benefits of each.
