A Sphere Phantom Approach to Measure Directional Modulation Transfer Functions for Tomosynthesis Imaging Systems.

We propose a sphere phantom approach to measure spatially varying directional modulation transfer functions (MTFs) for tomosynthesis imaging systems. Since the reconstructed tomosynthesis images contain significant artifacts, traditional background detrending techniques may not be effective to estimate the background trends accurately, which is essential to acquire sphere only data. A background detrending technique optimized for local volumes with different cone angles is presented. To measure directional MTFs, we calculate plane integrals of ideal sphere phantom and sphere only data. To minimize the effects of the high level of noise in tomosynthesis images, Richardson-Lucy deconvolution with Tikhonov-Miller is used to estimate directional plane spread function (PlSF). Then, directional MTFs are calculated by taking the modulus of the Fourier transform of the directional PlSFs. The measured directional MTFs are compared with the ideal directional MTFs calculated from a simulated point object. Our results show that the proposed method reliably measures directional MTFs along any desired directions, especially near low frequency regions.