Segmentation-free statistical image reconstruction for polyenergetic X-ray computed tomography

Abstract

This paper describes a statistical iterative reconstruction method for X-ray CT based on a physical model that accounts for the polyenergetic X-ray source spectrum and the measurement nonlinearities caused by energy-dependent attenuation. The algorithm accommodates mixtures of tissues with known mass attenuation coefficients but unknown densities. We formulate a penalized-likelihood approach for this polyenergetic model based on Poisson statistics.