Date of Award
5-13-2020
Major
Electrical Engineering
Faculty Advisor
Chen, Ying
Abstract
Kidney stone disease is one of the most common diseases that faces the American population. For proper diagnosis of kidney stones medical imaging must be performed. The current gold standard for kidney stone detection is computed tomography (CT) imaging. However, CT imaging exposes the patient to large amounts of x-ray radiation. Digital tomosynthesis is a novel technique in medical diagnosis due to its ability to generate high-resolution images while limiting the radiation dosage to patients. Tomosynthesis is a three-dimensional imaging technique that allows the reconstruction of an arbitrary set of planes from limited-angle series of projection images. Tomosynthesis has well-published success in the field of breast and chest imaging but has had limited studies performed in field of kidney imaging. In this study, C-arm geometry tomosynthesis was compared to traditional tomosynthesis using the shift and add reconstruction algorithm to evaluate the effectiveness of C-arm tomosynthesis for the application of kidney imaging. A simulation was created to generate projection images of each geometry and implement the shift and add algorithm. The results showed that when the images were reconstructed there was more blurring using C-arm tomosynthesis as compared to traditional tomosynthesis. This indicates that C-arm tomosynthesis geometry has the potential to be developed with other reconstruction algorithms to make it better suited for implementation in kidney imaging. Furthermore, the simulations developed in this study lay the groundwork for future development of C-arm tomosynthesis by providing a platform to test new reconstruction algorithms and optimize system parameters for clinical applications.