A Monte Carlo simulation of scattering reduction in spectral x-ray computed tomography

In X-ray computed tomography (CT), scattered radiation plays an important role in the accurate reconstruction of the inspected object, leading to a loss of contrast between the different materials in the reconstruction volume and cupping artifacts in the images. We present a Monte Carlo simulation tool for spectral X-ray CT to predict the scattered radiation generated by complex samples. An experimental setup is presented to isolate the energy distribution of scattered radiation. Spectral CT is a novel technique implementing photon-counting detectors able to discriminate the energy of incoming photons, enabling spectral analysis of X-ray images. This technique is useful to extract efficiently more information on energy dependent quantities (e.g. mass attenuations coefficients) and study matter interactions (e.g. X-ray scattering, photoelectric absorption, etc...). Having a good knowledge of the spectral distribution of the scattered X-rays is fundamental to establish methods attempting to correct for it. The simulations are validated by real measurements using a CdTe spectral resolving detector (Multix ME-100). We observed the effect of the scattered radiation on the image reconstruction, becoming relevant in the energy range where the Compton events are dominant (i.e. above 50keV).