A maximum likelihood method for high resolution proton radiography/proton CT.

Multiple Coulomb scattering (MCS) is the largest contributor to blurring in proton imaging. In this work, we developed a maximum likelihood least squares estimator that improves proton radiography's spatial resolution. The water equivalent thickness (WET) through projections defined from the source to the detector pixels were estimated such that they maximizes the likelihood of the energy loss of every proton crossing the volume. The length spent in each projection was calculated through the optimized cubic spline path estimate. The proton radiographies were produced using Geant4 simulations. Three phantoms were studied here: a slanted cube in a tank of water to measure 2D spatial resolution, a voxelized head phantom for clinical performance evaluation as well as a parametric Catphan phantom (CTP528) for 3D spatial resolution. Two proton beam configurations were used: a parallel and a conical beam. Proton beams of 200 and 330 MeV were simulated to acquire the radiography. Spatial resolution is increased from 2.44 lp cm-1 to 4.53 lp cm-1 in the 200 MeV beam and from 3.49 lp cm-1 to 5.76 lp cm-1 in the 330 MeV beam. Beam configurations do not affect the reconstructed spatial resolution as investigated between a radiography acquired with the parallel (3.49 lp cm-1 to 5.76 lp cm-1) or conical beam (from 3.49 lp cm-1 to 5.56 lp cm-1). The improved images were then used as input in a photon tomography algorithm. The proton CT reconstruction of the Catphan phantom shows high spatial resolution (from 2.79 to 5.55 lp cm-1 for the parallel beam and from 3.03 to 5.15 lp cm-1 for the conical beam) and the reconstruction of the head phantom, although qualitative, shows high contrast in the gradient region. The proposed formulation of the optimization demonstrates serious potential to increase the spatial resolution (up by 65[Formula: see text]) in proton radiography and greatly accelerate proton computed tomography reconstruction.