Photon counting CT in a C-arm interventional system: hardware development and artifact corrections

This work reports the development of a C-arm photon counting detectors (PCD)-CT system for evaluating the potential clinical utility of PCD-CT for intraoperative imaging. A dual-threshold CdTe-based strip PCD was mounted on a Siemens Artis Zee C-arm interventional system. A new geometric calibration method was developed to correct for the geometric distortion of the C-arm system during rotation. Experimental results show that, under clinically relevant conditions, the C-arm PCD-CT system can reliably and reproducibly generate high quality MDCT-like images without any noticeable geometric distortion or banding artifact.