Background: In intensity modulated radiation therapy, cone beam computed tomography (CT) has been used to evaluate patients prior to treatment. This study conducted a comparative evaluation of the image reconstruction ability of the clinically used half-fan bowtie filter and the full-fan bowtie filter. Materals and Methods: A CT simulation marker was inserted inside a human phantom, and the pel...

Introduction Cone Beam Computer Tomography (CBCT) is used to control the position of the patient based on internal body structures. Thereby, the CBCT data set is fitted to the planning CT image. The accuracy of this alignment process strongly depends on the quality of the CBCT images. The radiotherapy department of the cantonal hospital St.Gallen operates two Elekta Synergy linacs equipped with...

PURPOSE To investigate the correlation and stationarity of noise in volumetric computed tomography (CT) using the local discrete noise-power spectrum (NPS) and off-diagonal elements of the covariance matrix of the discrete Fourier transform of noise-only images (denoted Σ(DFT)). Experimental conditions were varied to affect noise correlation and stationarity, the effects were quantified in term...

PURPOSE In fluoroscopy-guided clinical procedures that involve tracking objects over long treatment times, there is a need for reducing the amount of imaging dose delivered to the patient and the operating staff. In this study, we introduce a feedback metric to minimize tube current while maintaining a targeting precision threshold. METHOD AND MATERIALS An acrylic sphere (1.6mm in diameter) w...

OBJECTIVES With the increased use of computed tomography (CT) in clinics, dose reduction is the most important feature people seek when considering new CT techniques or applications. We developed an intensity-weighted region-of-interest (IWROI) imaging method in an exact half-fan geometry to reduce the imaging radiation dose to patients in cone-beam CT (CBCT) for image-guided radiation therapy ...

Nanoscale bowtie aperture antennas can be used to focus light well below the diffraction limit with extremely high transmission efficiencies. This paper studies the spectral dependence of the transmission through nanoscale bowtie apertures defined in a silver film. A realistic bowtie aperture is numerically modeled using the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method. Results show that the tra...