Dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) is a promising technology that has shown a number of clinical advantages over conventional X-ray CT, such as improved material identification, artifact suppression, etc. For proton therapy treatment planning, besides material-selective images, maps of effective atomic number (Z) and relative electron density to that of water (ρe) can also be achieved and further employed to improve stopping power ratio accuracy and reduce range uncertainty. In this work, we propose a one-step iterative estimation method, which employs multi-domain gradient L0-norm minimization, for Z and ρe maps reconstruction. The algorithm was implemented on GPU to accelerate the predictive procedure and to support potential real-time adaptive treatment planning. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated via both phantom and patient studies.
@article{arxiv.2308.01290,
title = {One-step Iterative Estimation of Effective Atomic Number and Electron Density for Dual Energy CT},
author = {Qian Wang and Huiqiao Xie and Tonghe Wang and Justin Roper and Hao Gao and Zhen Tian and Xiangyang Tang and Jeffrey D. Bradley and Tian liu and Xiaofeng Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.01290},
year = {2023}
}