Pre-reconstruction three-material decomposition in dual-energy CT

It is of clinical interest to quantify the concentration of materials in a three-component mixture with known chemical compositions, such as bone-mineral density (BMD) in a trabecular bone composed of calcium hydroxyappitite (CaHA), yellow- and red-marrow, and iron content in the liver composed of soft tissue, fat, and iron. Both pre- and postreconstruction dual-energy CT methods have been used to achieve this goal. The pre-reconstruction method is more accurate due to the elimination of beam-hardening artifacts. After obtaining the equivalent densities of the two basis materials, however, it is unclear how to accurately estimate the concentration of each material in the presence of the third material in the mixture. In this work, we present a pre-reconstruction three-material decomposition method in dualenergy CT to quantify the concentration of each material in a three-component mixture with known chemical compositions. This method employs a specific physical constraint on the equivalent densities of the two basis materials obtained from the conventional basis-material decomposition. We evaluated this method using simulation studies on two types of three-component mixtures: bone-water-fat and Iron-water-CaHA. The results demonstrated that an accurate estimation of the concentration for each material can be achieved with the proposed method.