Comprehensive evaluations of a prototype full field-of-view photon counting CT system through phantom studies

Photon counting CT (PCCT) has been a research focus in the last two decades. Recent studies and advancements have demonstrated that systems using semiconductor-based photon counting detectors (PCDs) have the potential to provide better contrast, noise and spatial resolution performance compared to conventional scintillator-based systems. With multi-energy threshold detection, PCD can simultaneously provide the photon energy measurement and enable material decomposition for spectral imaging. In this work, we report a performance evaluation of our first CdZnTe-based prototype full-size photon counting CT system through various phantom imaging studies. This prototype system supports a 500 mm scan field-of-view (FOV) and 10 mm cone coverage at isocenter. Phantom scans were acquired using 120 kVp from 50 to 400 mAs to assess the imaging performance on: CT number accuracy, uniformity, noise, spatial resolution, material differentiation and quantification. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that PCCT has superior imaging performance with lower noise and improved spatial resolution compared to conventional energy integrating detector (EID)-CT. Using projection domain material decomposition approach with multiple energy bin measurements, PCCT virtual monoenergetic images (VMIs) have lower noise, and superior performance in quantifying iodine and calcium concentrations. These improvements lead to increased contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) for both high and low contrast study objects compared to EID-CT. PCCT can also generate super-high resolution (SHR) images using much smaller detector pixel size than EID-CT and dramatically improve image spatial resolution.