Patent ID: 8494244

Claim:
A CT system comprising: a rotatable gantry having an opening to receive a patient to be scanned; an x-ray source positioned on the rotatable gantry and configured to project x-rays toward a region-of-interest of the patient that includes a blood vessel in a stenosed condition and having a plaque material therein; an x-ray detector positioned on the rotatable gantry and positioned to receive x-rays emitted by the x-ray source and attenuated by the region-of-interest; a data acquisition system (DAS) operably connected to the x-ray detector; and a computer programmed to: obtain a first set of CT image data for the region-of-interest at a first chromatic energy level; obtain a second set of CT image data for the region-of-interest at a second chromatic energy level that is higher than the first chromatic energy level; identify plaque material in the region-of-interest by analyzing the second set of CT image data; isolate the identified plaque material pixels from the second set of CT image data; reconstruct one of a partial image and a full image of the region-of-interest from the first set of CT image data that includes at least an image of the blood vessel; and apply the isolated pixels corresponding to the plaque material to the one of the partial image and the full image generated from the first set of CT image data to generate a finalized image of the region-of-interest.