Structural noise from automatic exposure control device and its relationship to X-ray tube voltage used for calibration of a flat-panel detector system.

In flat-panel detector (FPD) systems, the ion-chamber dosimeters used for automatic exposure control (AEC), which are placed between the detector and the source, should not affect clinical images because of FPD gain correction, but can sometimes still introduce fixed-pattern noise. In this study, we investigated whether such artifacts were caused by structural noise from the AEC detector on the basis of the noise power spectrum (NPS) and the mean square error (MSE) of FPD images taken at various tube voltages either with or without the AEC detector. When the NPS was measured without the AEC detector, the NPS did not increase in the low special-frequency band at all radiation qualities tested, irrespective of X-ray calibration tube voltages. However, when the NPS was measured while the AEC detector was used, the NPS increased in the low special-frequency band at all radiation qualities when the X-ray calibration tube voltages were at low levels. Similarly, the MSE increased when the X-ray calibration tube voltages were at low levels. From these results, artifacts in the AEC detector appear to be suppressed when a radiation quality of approximately 90 kV is used at four different standardized radiations quality (RQA3, RQA5, RQA7, and RQA9).