Experimental verification of ion stopping power prediction from dual energy CT data in tissue surrogates

We present an experimental verification of stopping-power-ratio (SPR) prediction from dual energy CT (DECT) with potential use for dose planning in proton and ion therapy. The approach is based on DECT images converted to electron density relative to water rho(e)/rho(e, w) and effective atomic number Z(eff). To establish a parameterization of the I-value by Z(eff), 71 tabulated tissue compositions were used. For the experimental assessment of the method we scanned 20 materials (tissue surrogates, polymers, aluminum, titanium) at 80/140Sn kVp and 100/140Sn kVp (Sn: additional tin filtration) and computed the rho(e)/rho(e, w) and Z(eff) with a purely image based algorithm. Thereby, we found that rho(e)/rho(e, w) (Z(eff)) could be determined with an accuracy of 0.4% (1.7%) for the tissue surrogates with known elemental compositions. SPRs were predicted from DECT images for all 20 materials using the presented approach and were compared to measured water-equivalent path lengths (closely related to SPR). For the tissue surrogates the presented DECT approach was found to predict the experimental values within 0.6%, for aluminum and titanium within an accuracy of 1.7% and 9.4% (from 16-bit reconstructed DECT images).