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The imaging process has two fundamental stages: detection and display. The detection stage can be quantified rigourously using Shannon's information theory. This requires the contrast scale (CS), modulation transfer function (MTF), and noise power spectrum N(f) to be combined into a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This results in two fundamental summary figures of merit: the density of noise equivalent quanta (NEQ) in the image and the information bandwidth integral (IBWI). These algorithm-independent measures are used to quantify the recording stage. The display stage is less well understood since it couples to an external observer. Several types of decision makers are treated. Examples are drawn from first and second generation CT, demonstrating that thye are nearly quantum limited for large signals, indicating how their algorithms are matched or mismatched to the geometry, and calculating the contrast-detail diagrams for those decision makers.
Wagner et al. (Thu,) studied this question.