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Recent publications in the field of Computed Tomography (CT) demonstrate the rising interest in applying dual-energy methods for material classification during clinical routine examinations. Based on today's standard of technology, dual-energy CT can be realized by either scanning with different X-ray spectra or by deployment of energy selective detector technologies. The list of so-called dual-kVp methods contains sequential scans, fast kVp-switching and dual-source CT. Examples of energy selective detectors are scintillator-based energyintegrating dual-layer devices or direct converter with quantum counting electronics. The general difference of the approaches lies in the shape of the effectively detected X-ray energy spectra and in the presence of crossscatter radiation in the case of dual-source devices. This leads to different material classification capabilities for the various techniques. In this work, we present detector response simulations of realistic CT scans with subsequent CT image reconstruction. Analysis of the image data allows direct and objective comparison of the dual-kVp, dual-layer, and quantum counting CT system concepts. The dual-energy performance is benchmarked in terms of image noise and Iodine-bone separation power at given image sharpness and dose exposure. For the case of dual-source devices the effect of cross-scatter radiation, as well as the benefit of additional filtering are taken into account.
Kappler et al. (Thu,) studied this question.