A metal artifact reduction method for small field of view CT imaging

PLoS One. 2021 Jan 14;16(1):e0227656. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227656. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Several sinogram inpainting based metal artifact reduction (MAR) methods have been proposed to reduce metal artifact in CT imaging. The sinogram inpainting method treats metal trace regions as missing data and estimates the missing information. However, a general assumption with these methods is that data truncation does not occur and that all metal objects still reside within the field-of-view (FOV). These assumptions are usually violated when the FOV is smaller than the object. Thus, existing inpainting based MAR methods are not effective. In this paper, we propose a new MAR method to effectively reduce metal artifact in the presence of data truncation. The main principle of the proposed method involves using a newly synthesized sinogram instead of the originally measured sinogram. The initial reconstruction step involves obtaining a small FOV image with the truncation artifact removed. The final step is to conduct sinogram inpainting based MAR methods, i.e., linear and normalized MAR methods, on the synthesized sinogram from the previous step. The proposed method was verified for extended cardiac-torso simulations, clinical data, and experimental data, and its performance was quantitatively compared with those of previous methods (i.e., linear and normalized MAR methods directly applied to the originally measured sinogram data). The effectiveness of the proposed method was further demonstrated by reducing the residual metal artifact that were present in the reconstructed images obtained using the previous method.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Artifacts
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Metals / chemistry*
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods*

Substances

  • Metals

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the Bio and Medical Technology Development Program of the National Research Foundation (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (NRF-2019R1A2C2084936 and 2020R1A4A1016619) and the Korea Medical Device Development Fund grant funded by the Korea government (the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety) (202011A03).