ABSTRACT

X-ray tomosynthesis is a pseudo-tomographic imaging method that can partially address the problem of structural overlap encountered in planar X-ray imaging. All of these tomosynthesis imaging applications share a common feature: they all utilize the absorption of X-rays to generate image contrast. For phase-contrast tomosynthesis images reconstructed by shift-and-add and Filtered Back Projection (FBP), their noise power spectrum (NPS) show no fundamental difference except their magnitudes, because the modulus of the Hilbert kernel used in FBP is frequency independent. The NPS of the phase-contrast tomosynthesis imaging system also depends on the specific phase-contrast imaging method. In tomosynthesis imaging, Contrast-to-Noise Ratio is also referred to as the signal difference-to-noise ratio. The in-plane spatial resolution of tomosynthesis images can be characterized using line profile through the edge of an object or with the modulation transfer function. In X-ray imaging, truncation is the cutoff of the signal from an image object beyond the maximal field-of-view supported by the detector and X-ray beam.