A hybrid approach to simulate multiple photon scattering in X-ray imaging

A hybrid simulation approach is proposed to compute the contribution of scattered radiation in X- or gamma-ray imaging. This approach takes advantage of the complementarity between the deterministic and probabilistic simulation methods. The proposed hybrid method consists of two stages. Firstly, a set of scattering events occurring in the inspected object is determined by means of classical Monte Carlo simulation. Secondly, this set of scattering events is used as a starting point to compute the energy imparted to the detector, with a deterministic algorithm based on a 'forced detection' scheme. For each scattering event, the probability for the scattered photon to reach each pixel of the detector is calculated using well-known physical models (form factor and incoherent scattering function approximations, in the case of Rayleigh and Compton scattering respectively). The results of the proposed hybrid approach are compared to those obtained with the Monte Carlo method alone (Geant4 code) and found to be in excellent agreement. The convergence of the results when the number of scattering events increases is studied. The proposed hybrid approach makes it possible to simulate the contribution of each type (Compton or Rayleigh) and order of scattering, separately or together, with a single PC, within reasonable computation times (from minutes to hours, depending on the number of pixels of the detector). This constitutes a substantial benefit, compared to classical simulation methods (Monte Carlo or deterministic approaches), which usually requires a parallel computing architecture to obtain comparable results. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.