Two-Step Image Registration for Dual-Layer Flat-Panel Detectors

Background: For a single exposure in radiography, a dual-layer flat-panel detector (DFD) can provide spectral images and efficiently utilize the transmitted X-ray photons to improve the detective quantum efficiency (DQE) performance. In this paper, to acquire high DQE performance, we present a registration method for X-ray images acquired from a DFD, considering only spatial translations and scale factors. The conventional registration methods have inconsistent estimate accuracies depending on the captured object scene, even when using entire pixels, and have deteriorated frequency performance because of the interpolation method employed.

Methods: The proposed method consists of two steps; the first step is conducting a spatial translation according to the Fourier shift theorem with a subpixel registration, and the second step is conducting a scale transformation using cubic interpolation to process the X-ray projections. To estimate the subpixel spatial translation, a maximum-amplitude method using a small portion of the slant-edge phantom is used.

Results: The performance of the proposed two-step method is first theoretically analyzed and then observed by conducting extensive experiments and measuring the noise power spectrum and DQE. An example for registering chest images is also shown. For a DFD, the proposed method shows a better registration result than the conventional one-step registration. The DQE improvement was more than 56% under RQA 9 compared to the single flat-panel detector case.

Conclusions: The proposed two-step registration method can efficiently provide aligned image pairs from the DFD to improve the DQE performance at low doses and, thus, increase the accuracy of clinical diagnosis.