Investigation of signal thresholding to reduce the effects of instrument noise of an EMCCD based micro-CT system.

This project investigated the signal thresholding effectiveness at reducing the instrument noise of an electron multiplying charged coupled device (EMCCD) based micro-CT system at low x-ray exposure levels. Scans of a mouse spine and an iodine phantom were taken using an EMCCD detector coupled with a micro-CT system. An iodine filter of 4 mg/cm2 area density was placed in the beam. The output signal was thresholded using some multiple of the inherent background noise. For each threshold, 100, 200, and 300 frames were summed for each projection to evaluate the effect on the reconstructed image. The projection images from the scans were compared using line profiles and their SNR. Our results indicate that, as the threshold was increased, the line profiles of the projection images showed less statistical variation, but also lower signal levels, so that the SNR of the projection images decreased as the threshold increased. When the line profile of a projection image obtained using a signal threshold is compared with one obtained using energy integrating mode, the profile obtained using thresholding had less variation than that obtained using energy integration, which indicates less instrument noise. The SNR at the edges of the scan object is higher in the thresholded images when compared with the energy integrated projection images. We conclude that thresholding the output signal from an EMCCD detector at low x-ray exposure levels is an effective method to reduce the instrument noise of an EMCCD detector.