Spectral CT modeling and reconstruction with hybrid detectors in dynamic-threshold-based counting and integrating modes.

Spectral CT with photon counting detectors can significantly improve CT performance by reducing image noise and dose, increasing contrast resolution and material specificity, as well as enabling functional and molecular imaging with existing and emerging probes. However, the current photon counting detector architecture is difficult to balance the number of energy bins and the statistical noise in each energy bin. Moreover, the hardware support for multi-energy bins demands a complex circuit which is expensive. In this paper, we promote a new scheme known as hybrid detectors that combine the dynamic-threshold-based counting and integrating modes. In this scheme, an energy threshold can be dynamically changed during a spectral CT scan, which can be considered as compressive sensing along the spectral dimension. By doing so, the number of energy bins can be retrospectively specified, even in a spatially varying fashion. To establish the feasibility and merits of such hybrid detectors, we develop a tensor-based PRISM algorithm to reconstruct a spectral CT image from dynamic dual-energy data, and perform experiments with simulated and real data, producing very promising results.