Contribution of Scattered X Rays to Signal Imaging with Anti-scatter Grids

We have investigated the contribution of the scattered x rays to the signal imaging in the radiographs acquired with anti-scatter grids of several grid ratios by separating the line spread functions (LSFs) derived from the signal edge image into the primary and the scatter components. By using a 1.0-mm lead plate in the scattering material, the blurred signal edge images were acquired by use of an imaging plate at a tube voltage of 80 kV with the anti-scatter grids of grid ratios for 5:1, 6:1, 8:1, 10:1 and 12:1. The edge profiles of the signal images were scanned and those in relative exposure were differentiated to obtain the LSFs. To investigate the contribution of the scattered x rays to the signal imaging, we proposed a method for separating the LSFs derived from the signal images into the primary and the scatter components, where the scatter component was approximated with exponential function. Our basic approach is to separate the area of the LSFs by ratios of the scattered x-ray exposure to the primary x-ray exposure, which were obtained for the grid ratios by use of a lead disk method. The LSFs and the two components were Fourier transformed to obtain the modulation transfer functions (MTFs) and their two components. As the result, we found that, by using the anti-scatter grids, the scattered x rays were reduced, but the shape of the LSFs of the scatter component hardly changed. The contributions of the scatter component to the MTFs were not negligible (more than 10 %) for spatial frequencies lower than about 1.0 mm$\^$-l/ and that was greater as the grid ratio decreasing. On the other hand, for higher frequencies, the primary component was dominant compared with the scatter component.