  Inferior soft-tissue contrast resolution is a major limitation of current CT
scanners. The aim of the study is to improve the contrast resolution of CT
scanners using dual-energy acquisition. Based on dual-energy material
decomposition, the proposed method starts with extracting the outgoing energy
spectrum by polychromatic forward projecting the material-selective images. The
extracted spectrum is then reweighted to boost the soft-tissue contrast. A
simulated water cylinder phantom with inserts that contain a series of six
solutions of varying iodine concentration (range, 0-20 mg/mL) is used to
evaluate the proposed method. Results show the root mean square error (RMSE)
and mean energy difference between the extracted energy spectrum and the
spectrum acquired using an energy-resolved photon counting detector(PCD), are
0.044 and 0.01 keV, respectively. Compared to the method using the standard
energy-integrating detectors, dose normalized contrast-to-noise ratio (CNRD)
for the proposed method are improved from 1 to 2.15 and from 1 to 1.88 for the
8 mg/mL and 16 mg/mL iodine concentration inserts, respectively. The results
show CT image reconstructed using the proposed method is superior to the image
reconstructed using the standard method that using an energy-integrating
detector.
