Improving iodine contrast to noise ratio using virtual monoenergetic imaging and prior-knowledge-aware iterative denoising (mono-PKAID)

Multi-energy CT acquires simultaneous multiple x-ray attenuation measurements from different energy spectra which facilitates the computation of virtual monoenergetic images (VMI) at a specific photon energy (keV). Since the contrast between iodine attenuation and the attenuation of surrounding soft tissues increases at lower x-ray energies, VMIs in the range of 40–70 keV can be used to improve iodine visualization. However, at lower energy...