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Abstract

An improved acquisition scheme for a medical imaging and treatment system 100. According to one aspect of the invention, adaptive radiation detection, for determining when therapeutic or diagnostic radiation is being applied, is provided. The imaging device 124 acquires several test images during a preacquisition delay. The maximum intensity level from these test images is defined as the upper limit of a camera 122's response in the darkness. The standard deviation of the intensity distribution is also computed. The image intensity level of the subsequent test images are compared to a radiation detection threshold which is determined to be the upper limit of the camera's dark signal, plus twice the standard deviation of pixel intensity distribution of the dark test images. If the intensities of a statistically significant number of pixels exceeds the threshold, the radiation is considered to be on. According to another aspect of the invention, a single look-up table is used for both the test images and the actual acquisition images. The single look-up table is downloaded upon detection of power to a linear accelerator 101. According to still another aspect of the present invention calibration of a lower bound of a signal of interest occurs using a histogram based algorithm, so that only the histogram needs to be transferred from the imaging board to the host computer. Furthermore, the present invention is capable of automatically calculating the upper bound of a signal of interest. In addition, the present invention is configured for continuous image integration such that each acquisition cycle is repeated until the linear accelerator 101 is turned off. Thus, the final image is the integration of images from each acquisition cycle.

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First Claim