STEPC: A Multi-energy Nonuniform Response Calibration Framework for Photon-Counting Micro-CT in Multi-material Imaging
Photon-counting computed tomography has demonstrated significant advancements in recent years; however, micro photon-counting CT (Micro-PCCT) systems are still limited by pixel-wise detector response nonuniformity, which degrades measurement uniformity across detector pixels and commonly produces ring artifacts in reconstructed images. Existing calibration methods exhibit limited generalizability in complex multi-material scenarios, such as contrast-enhanced imaging. This study introduces a Signal-to-Nonuniformity Error Polynomial Calibration (STEPC) framework based on measurement nonuniformity error modeling to address this issue. STEPC first fits multi-energy projections using a 2D polynomial surface to generate ideal references, then applies a nonlinear multi-energy polynomial model to predict and correct pixel-wise nonuniformity errors. The model is calibrated using homogeneous slab phantoms of different materials, including PMMA, aluminum, and iodinated contrast agents, enabling correction for both non-contrast and contrast-enhanced imaging. Experiments were performed on a custom Micro-PCCT system with phantoms and mouse. Correction performance of STEPC was evaluated using the mean local standard deviation (MLSD) in the projection domain and the ring artifact deviation (RAD) on the reconstructed images. Compared with existing methods, STEPC achieved an average MLSD reduction of at least 21.58% and reduced RAD by at least 14.18%, consistently yielding the best performance in both non-contrast and contrast-enhanced scenarios. Furthermore, STEPC can be readily extended to compensate for beam hardening effects within the same calibration framework. Quantitative material decomposition results indicate that the proposed method preserves measurement accuracy across different basis materials...