Towards clinical application of a Laplace operator-based region of interest reconstruction algorithm in C-arm CT

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2014 Mar;33(3):593-606. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2013.2291622.

Abstract

It is known that a reduction of the field-of-view in 3-D X-ray imaging is proportional to a reduction in radiation dose. The resulting truncation, however, is incompatible with conventional reconstruction algorithms. Recently, a novel method for region of interest reconstruction that uses neither prior knowledge nor extrapolation has been published, named approximated truncation robust algorithm for computed tomography (ATRACT). It is based on a decomposition of the standard ramp filter into a 2-D Laplace filtering and a 2-D Radon-based residual filtering step. In this paper, we present two variants of the original ATRACT. One is based on expressing the residual filter as an efficient 2-D convolution with an analytically derived kernel. The second variant is to apply ATRACT in 1-D to further reduce computational complexity. The proposed algorithms were evaluated by using a reconstruction benchmark, as well as two clinical data sets. The results are encouraging since the proposed algorithms achieve a speed-up factor of up to 245 compared to the 2-D Radon-based ATRACT. Reconstructions of high accuracy are obtained, e.g., even real-data reconstruction in the presence of severe truncation achieve a relative root mean square error of as little as 0.92% with respect to nontruncated data.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Artifacts
  • Head / diagnostic imaging
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Radiation Dosage
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods*