Continued Development Of An Inexpensive Simulator Based CT Scanner For Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning

An abundant number of different CT scanner models has been developed in the past ten years, meeting increasing standards of performance. From the beginning they remained a comparatively expensive piece of equipment. This is due not only to their technical complexity but is also due to the difficulties involved in assessing "true" specifications (avoiding "overde-sign"). Our aim has been to provide, for Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning, a low cost CT scanner system featuring large freedom in patient positioning. We have taken advantage of the concurrent tremendously increased amount of knowledge and experience in the technical area of CT1 . By way of extensive computer simulations we gained confidence that an inexpensive C-arm simulator gantry and a simple one phase-two pulse generator in connection with a standard x-ray tube could be used, without sacrificing image quality. These components have been complemented by a commercial high precision shaft encoder, a simple and effective fan beam collimator, a high precision, high efficiency, luminescence crystal-silicon photodiode detector with 256 channels, low noise electronic preamplifier and sampling filter stages, a simplified data aquisition system furnished by Toshiba/ Analogic and an LSI 11/23 microcomputer plus data storage disk as well as various smaller interfaces linking the electrical components. The quality of CT scan pictures of phantoms,performed by the end of last year confirmed that this simple approach is working well. As a next step we intend to upgrade this system with an array processor in order to shorten recon-struction time to one minute per slice. We estimate that the system including this processor could be manufactured for a selling price of $210,000.