Quantitative Untersuchung der Streubeiträge in Hochenergie-Röntgencomputertomografie

Quantitative assessment of scattering contributions in high energy cone-beam computed tomography. X-ray computed tomography (CT) is an established method in the fields of failure analysis and quality control. The energy of the X-ray beam determines the penetration length of the radiation and hereby limits the size and the density of the object that is investigated. For the case of large, dense and heavy objects, X-ray energies exceeding one mega electronvolt (MeV) are needed to achieve measureable transmission values. An important factor for the quality of X-ray CT is the contribution of scattered radiation in the radiographies. X-ray photons can be scattered from the object as well as the instrumentation and the environment which leads to a distorted transmission image. Besides scattered radiation, the physical effect of pair production has to be taken into account for radiation in the range of MeV. This work investigates the impact of each of the scattering processes on the radiography. Detailed Monte Carlo simulations help to distinguish the physical interactions as well as scattered radiation from system components. In contrast to previous studies, not only a set of simple geometric objects made of different materials is examined, but also models of the components of a CT scanner are used to estimate the contribution of scattering of various system components.