PSP CR Imaging: Notebook 4

Computed radiography is a type of digital radiography, but is unique from film. It does
not go through a physical processing process, but rather a digital one. It uses a cassette, similar to
film, but the film screen does not need to be processed in a dark room by the radiographer.
Instead it uses a CR reader that takes the film screen out of the cassette and reads it using a laser
in raster pattern, either using a point scan method or a line scan method, and then processes and
displays the image on a monitor, the film is then erased and put back into the cassette.

Computed radiography typically uses a photostimulable imaging plate, a sheet with a

protective layer, phosphor layer, a support layer, a conductor layer and a light-shield layer,
pictured below.

The protective layer protects the contents of the plate from being scratched or bent. The
phosphor layer is the layer that holds the main component that interacts with the x-rays, it is a
photostimulable phosphor usually made using barium fluorohalide phosphors. The support layer
allows the plate to keep a strong structure and is the first layer used when making the plate; this
is the layer that is coated by the other layers. The conductor layer keeps electrostatic off the
plate. The light-shielding layer or the reflecting layer keeps light from erasing the data on the
plate and keeps light from leaking through the cassette.

When the photons interact with the PSP plate they interact with the electrons contained in
the phosphor layer, within the barium fluorohalide crystals. Energy is handed off to the stored
electrons and they are kept within the crystal, this signal is the latent image. The charged
electrons may remain for days; however, they slowly start to lose their charges as time goes on,
reducing the quality of the image. This is why it is important to run the plate through the CR
reader as soon as possible.
 As discussed previously the CR readers may have either a point scan laser or a line scan
laser. The point scan reader will read the image one point at a time, from left to right, line by
line. A line scan laser will read one line at a time from top to bottom. In order for the laser to
read the latent image the atoms within it have to be excited, this is done by reflecting the energy
back and forth, resulting in a stream of light being emitted to the plate, with all of the photons
traveling in the same direction at the same frequency, (Carter, 2014).

A helium laser reads the information on the plate using a red light that excites the
electrons in order to allow them to be freed from their crystals and return to their photostimulated
luminescence state, when they are freed from the crystal they emit a blue light that is recorded by
a photodetector, the photodetector converts the light to an analog signal which is then sent to an
analog-to-digital converter, this process is shown in the image above (Paudyal, 2012). When the
image is in an analog form each pixel has a number that has been recorded and has an associated
grayscale.

The processer uses different algorithms to find the part on the image, as well as the
collimated edges. First the processor will find the collimated edges, and based on the histogram
selected before the plate was read the processor will try to match what the image should look like
with the data it has acquired and it will get rid of everything outside of those edges. A look-up
table is then applied which will attempt to make final touches on the image that the radiographer
took to correct any small technical factor deviance. The raw data is stored that way if a mistake
is made when choosing the histogram, it can be reprocessed using the correct one.