Radiation Protection Dosimetry Advance Access originally published online on February 3, 2006
Radiation Protection Dosimetry 2005 117(1-3):304-308; doi:10.1093/rpd/nci745
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Quantification of motion unsharpness in digital fluoroscopy
1 Regional Medical Physics Department, Newcastle General Hospital, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE4 6BE, UK
2 Clinical Physics Group, St Bartholemew's Hospital, London EC1A 7BE, UK
3 Department of Radiology (Medical Physics), School of Medicine, Complutense University of Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
* Corresponding author: John.Kotre{at}nuth.northy.nhs.uk
The objectives of this work were first to develop a convenient method to quantify persistence in digital fluoroscopy systems, then to quantify the effect of variable temporal averaging on the detection of moving low-contrast test details within digital fluoroscopic and pulsed fluoroscopic images. The results were analysed to clarify the relationship between the optimum persistence required to see the lowest contrast for circular test details for a range of diameters and their speed of movement. The optimum persistence values obtained are compared with the limited data available on speeds of movement of patient organs during fluoroscopy. It is tentatively concluded that for imaging the abdomen, the optimum imaging system persistence time constant is
0.15 s. For the much greater speeds associated with cardiac motion, no additional frame averaging is necessary, i.e. just the persistence provided by the observer's visual system appears to be optimal for small objects.