Comparison of image and data domain methods for three-material decomposition in dual-energy CT

In this work we propose a novel three-material decomposition method in the data domain which is based on a conservation of volume constraint. We compare the approach with an image-based decomposition method using a recently proposed polyenergetic reconstruction algorithm to generate the reconstructed images. Our preliminary results indicate that the image-based decomposition using polyenergetic reconstruction provides better image quality than the data-domain approach.