Photon counting detector CT (PCD-CT) offers potential advantages over traditional energy-integrating detector CT (EID-CT), such as enhanced spatial resolution, contrast-to-noise ratio, and spectral imaging capabilities. A crucial characteristic influencing its performance is “dead time.” This metric, introduced in the literature, describes the minimum time required between two photon events for accurate counting statistics. However, determining the dead time of a PCD detector proves challenging because of its dependence on multiple technical factors. This challenge is exacerbated by pulse pileup correction schemes developed by various detector manufacturers and academic researchers. Consequently, a direct experimental method to measure dead time becomes increasingly important in practice. In this study, we present such a few experimental methods to estimate the “effective dead time” of a PCD detector.
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