Investigation of tomosynthetic perfusion measurements using the scanning-beam digital x-ray (SBDX) system

The feasibility of making regional perfusion measurements using a tomosynthetic digital subtraction angiography (TDSA) acquisition has been demonstrated. The study of tomosynthetic perfusion measurements was motivated by the clinical desire for perfusion measurements in an interventional angiography suite. These pilot studies were performed using the scanning-beam digital x-ray (SBDX) system which is an inverse-geometry imaging device which utilizes an electromagnetically-scanned x-ray source, and a small CdTe direct conversion photon counting detector. The scanning electron source was used to acquire planar-tomographic images of a 12.5 x 12.5 cm field of view at a frame rate of 15 frames/sec during dynamic contrast injection. A beagle animal model was used to evaluate the tomosynthetic perfusion measurements. A manual bolus injection of iodinated contrast solution was used in order to resolve the parameters of the contrast pass curve. The acquired planar tomosynthetic dataset was reconstructed with a simple back-projection algorithm. Digital subtraction techniques were used to visualize the change in contrast agent intensity in each reconstructed plane. Given the TDSA images, region of interest based analysis was used in the selection of the image pixels corresponding to the artery and tissue bed. The mean transit time (MTT), regional cerebral blood volume (rCBV) and regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were extracted from the tomosynthetic data for selected regions in each of the desired reconstructed planes. For the purpose of this study, the arterial contrast enhancement curve was fit with a combination of gamma variate terms, and the MTT was calculated using a deconvolution based on the singular value decomposition (SVD). The results of the contrast pass curves derived with TDSA were consistent with the results from perfusion measurements as implemented with CT acquisition.