Non-Gaussian noise in x-ray and γ-ray detectors

Image statistics are usually modeled as Poisson in γ-ray imaging and as Gaussian in x-ray imaging. In nuclear medicine, event-driven detectors analyze the pulses from every absorbed gamma photon individually; the resulting images rigorously obey Poisson statistics but are approximately Gaussian when the mean number of counts per pixel is large. With integrating detectors, as in digital radiography, each x-ray photon makes a contribution to the image proportional to its pulse height. One pixel senses many photons in long exposures, so the image statistics approach Gaussian by the central limit theorem (CLT). If the exposure time is short enough, however, each pixel will usually respond to no more than one photon, and we can separate individual photons for position estimation. Integrating detectors are therefore event-driven when we use many short-exposure frames rather than one long exposure. In intermediate exposures, the number of photons in one pixel is too small to invoke CLT and apply Gaussian statistics, yet too large to identify individual photons and apply Poisson statistics. In this paper, we analyze the image quality in this intermediate case. Image quality is defined for detection tasks performed by the ideal observer. Because the frames in a data set are independent of each other, the probability density function (PDF) of the whole data set is a product of the frame PDFs. The log-likelihood ratio A of the ideal observer is thus a sum across the frames and has Gaussian statistics even with non-Gaussian images. We compare the ideal observer's performance with the Hotelling observer's performance under this approximation. A data-thresholding technique to improve Hotelling observer's performance is also discussed.