L-shell x-ray fluorescence computed tomography (XFCT) imaging of Cisplatin

X-ray fluorescence computed tomography (XFCT) imaging has been focused on the detection of K-shell x-rays. The potential utility of L-shell x-ray XFCT is, however, not well studied. Here we report the first Monte Carlo (MC) simulation of preclinical L-shell XFCT imaging of Cisplatin. We built MC models for both L- and K-shell XFCT with different excitation energies (15 and 30 keV for L-shell and 80 keV for K-shell XFCT). Two small-animal sized imaging phantoms of 2 and 4 cm diameter containing a series of objects of 0.6 to 2.7 mm in diameter at 0.7 to 16 mm depths with 10 to 250 g mL^-1 concentrations of Pt are used in the study. Transmitted and scattered x-rays were collected with photon-integrating transmission detector and photon-counting detector arc, respectively. Collected data were rearranged into XFCT and transmission CT sinograms for image reconstruction. XFCT images were reconstructed with filtered back-projection and with iterative maximum-likelihood expectation maximization without and with attenuation correction. While K-shell XFCT was capable of providing an accurate measurement of Cisplatin concentration, its sensitivity was 4.4 and 3.0 times lower than that of L-shell XFCT with 15 keV excitation beam for the 2 cm and 4 cm diameter phantom, respectively. With the inclusion of excitation and fluorescence beam attenuation correction, we found that L-shell XFCT was capable of providing fairly accurate information of Cisplatin concentration distribution. With a dose of 29 and 58 mGy, clinically relevant Cisplatin Pt concentrations of 10 g mg^-1 could be imaged with L-shell XFCT inside a 2 cm and 4 cm diameter object, respectively.