The energy weighting technique: measurements and simulations

The technique of energy weighting takes advantage of the upcoming energy resolving properties of X-ray pixel detectors. It can improve the image quality up to a factor of 1.5 [1]. Because the usability of lower photon energies is limited in the presence of scattered radiation, we derived an adapted weighting function for this case. As the applied patient dose is an important item in medical imaging, we investigated the dose reduction capability: energy weighting can halve the dose. Our studies of detector properties show that the energy bin size (i.e. number of energy channels) of the imaging system has a comparatively small impact on the benefit. Additionally, with optimised bin border positions, it is possible to achieve about 90% of maximum improvement with only three energy bins. To investigate the practical feasibility of energy weighting with present detectors, we successfully used the Medipix2