Investigation of noise sources for digital radiography systems

The performance of digital radiography systems can be evaluated in terms of spatial resolution and noise. Noise plays an important role in the achievable image quality for detecting small and low-contrast structures in digital images created by these systems. Our aim in this study was to investigate the noise sources both in the spatial and frequency domain for three digital radiography systems, one digital fluoroscopy system, and one digital mammography system, and to obtain information about the effective operating dose range of these detectors. Noise evaluation in the spatial domain was done with the relative standard deviation–detector air kerma relationship evaluation method. The characterization of the noise in the spatial domain gives information about the types of noise, but does not give information about the noise power distribution in frequency space. Therefore, noise evaluation in the frequency domain was carried out by noise power spectrum measurement. The observed dominant noise component at lower detector doses was electronic noise for the digital mammography system, whereas structured noise was observed to make up nearly half of the total noise at higher detector doses for one of the digital radiography systems. The structured noise component was increased by use of a grid in these systems, independent of the grid ratio and grid frequency, but this increase was lower for higher grid frequencies. Furthermore, the structured noise coefficient was decreased with gain and offset calibrations. The five systems which we evaluated behaved as a quantum noise limited for clinically used detector doses.