Detector response artefacts in spectral reconstruction

Energy resolved detectors are gaining traction as a tool to achieve better material contrast. K-edge imaging and tomography is an example of a method with high potential that has evolved on the capabilities of photon counting energy dispersive detectors. Border security is also beginning to see instruments taking advantage of energy resolved detectors.

The progress of the field is halted by the limitations of the detectors. The limitations include nonlinear response for both x-ray intensity and x-ray spectrum. In this work we investigate how the physical interactions in the energy dispersive detectors affect the quality of the reconstruction and how corrections restore the quality.

We have modeled detector responses for the primary detrimental effects occurring in the detector; escape peaks, charge sharing/loss and pileup. The effect of the change in the measured spectra is evaluated based on the artefacts occurring in the reconstructed images. We also evaluate the effect of a correction algorithm for reducing these artefacts on experimental data acquired with a setup using Multix ME-100 V-2 line detector modules.

The artefacts were seen to introduce 20% deviation in the reconstructed attenuation coefficient for the uncorrected detector. We performed tomography experiments on samples with various materials interesting for security applications and found the SSIM to increase >; 5% below 60keV. Our work shows that effective corrections schemes are necessary for the accurate material classification in security application promised by the advent of high flux detectors for spectral tomography