Advanced data acquisition

Thuto Motaung

DGIS401
Acquiring an image

• This section covers the role of the physical equipment in acquiring an

image i.e. the gantry and detectors.
Axial vs spiral scanning
Axial scanning
“Step and shoot”
• Gantry stops and rotates to acquire data from single slice
• X-rays switched off
• Patient moves to next slice
• Rotates to acquire data from next slice
Spiral scanning
Spiral scanning
• Aka helical
• Gantry keeps rotating continuously releasing x-ray beams.
• The couch simultaneously moves.
• This results in a continuous spiral scanning pattern.
Spiral scanning - Advantages:

• Avoids respiratory misregistration as scan performed during one

breath
• More effective use of contrast agent as faster scanning enables
scanning during multiple phases in one contrast injection e.g. portal
venous, angiographic, delayed
• Overlapping slices allows better reconstruction and helps in showing
smaller lesions
• Pitch > 1 can be used to reduce scan time and / or radiation dose and
still cover the same volume
• All images are now acquired in this way.
Pitch
The pitch is the measure of overlap during scanning.
Pitch = 10/10 = 1
• Pitch = 20/10 = 2

Pitch = distance couch travels / width of slice

Pitch = 5/10 = 0.5
• A pitch number > 1 = couch travels more than the width of the beam
i.e. there are gaps
• A pitch number < 1 = couch travels less than the width of the beam
i.e. there is overlap
• For higher pitch numbers:
• Advantages:
• Lower radiation dose
• Quicker scan
• Disadvantages:
• More sparsely sampled
Multislice scanning
• Rather than just have one row of detectors, we now have multiple
parallel rows of detectors. Certain rows of detectors can then be
selected to change the slice thickness along with the collimator
Multislice scanning - Advantages:
• Faster scanning due to wider total active detector
width
• Better dynamic imaging due to faster scanning times
• Thinner slices
• 3D imaging is enabled by thin slices
• Simultaneous acquisition of multiple slices
Detector arrays
Types of Multislice Detector Types:
• Linear
• Adaptive
• Hybrid arrays
1. Linear array
2. Adaptive array
Adaptive detector array
The elements within the central detector rows are the thinnest and
they get wider towards the outside.
• Advantages:
• As few detector elements as possible activated to still give a large range of
detector slices
• Fewer detector rows activated means fewer septae dividing up the rows. This
improves the dose efficiency.
• Disadvantage:
• Upgrading to more data channels requires an expensive detector
replacement.
3. Hybrid array
• Similar to linear arrays in that the elements within the
detector rows are the same width across. However,
the central group of detector rows are narrower than
the outer rows.
• These are the main detector arrays used for 16-slice
scanners and above.
Multislice pitch

• There are two methods to calculate the pitch in a

multislice scanner. The first (pitchd) is analogous to the
single slice pitch and only takes into account the width
of the x-ray beam.
• Pitchd = couch travel per rotation / width of x-ray
beam
• However, this does not fully represent the overlapping
of the x-ray beam and, instead, pitchx is now used.
• Pitchx = couch travel per rotation / total width of
simultaneously acquired slices
• This is comparable to the definition of pitch for single
slice spiral scanning as the total collimated width is
analogous to the detector subgroup width in single
slice spiral scanning.
• Key points
• Pitch
• Single slice pitch = detector pitch = couch travel per rotation / detector width
• Multislice pitch = beam pitch = couch travel per rotation / total width of
simultaneously acquired slices
• Slice thickness
• Single slice CT = determined by collimation. Limited by detector row width.
• Multisclice CT = determined by width of detector rows