Point spread function modeling method for X-ray flat panel detector imaging

Flat panel detector (FPD) has been widely used as the imaging unit in the current X-ray digital radiography (DR) systems and Computed Tomography (CT) systems. Point spread function (PSF) is an important indicator of the FPD imaging system, but also the basis for image restoration. For the problem of poor accuracy of the FPD's PSF measurement with the original pinhole imaging for DR systems, a new PSF measuring method with the pinhole imaging based on the image restoration is proposed in this paper. Firstly, some images collected with the pinhole imaging are averaged to one image to reducing the noise. Then, the original pinhole image is calculated according to the energy conservation principle of point spread. Finally, the PSF of the FPD is obtained using the operation of image restoration. On this basis, through the fitting of the characteristic parameters of the PSF on different scan conditions, the computational model of the PSF is established for any scan conditions. Experimental results show that the method can obtain a more accurate PSF of the FPD, and the PSF of the same system under any scan conditions can be directly calculated with the PSF model.