New technology to speed up CT scans

A researcher team of the University of Carolina has pioneered the method, which is already used in telecommunications technology, that collects images from many sources at one, instead of the current serial method of data collection. The researcher around Jian Zhang will presented the technique at this week´s annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine in Minneapolis.

 

Modern CT scanners collect over 1,000 images in less than one second by high-speed rotation of an x-ray tube around the object. These data is collected in a serial fashion, essentially one piece of data at a time.

 

Multiplexing is a process of combining multiple signals to form one composite signal for transmission. For the multiplexing CT-scanner, multiple x-ray sources fire simultaneously to capture images from multiple views at the same time. In general, a factor of N/2 increase in the speed can be achieved using the multiplexing technique. For example. The speed of clinical CT scanners that acquire around 1,000 views per gantry rotation would increase by factor 500.

 

The researchers has been developing multiplex CT scanners for several years, recently they created a 25-pixel multiplexing CT scanner. According to Jian Zhang, the cost of these machines would not rise significantly, as new technology enables hundreds of x-ray cathodes to be fabricated on a single silicon wafer.