Noise suppression in scatter correction for cone beam CT英文文献.pdfVIP

Noise suppression in scatter correction for cone-beam CT Lei Zhu,a Jing Wang, and Lei Xing Department of Radiation Oncology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305 Received 23 July 2008; revised 10 December 2008; accepted for publication 11 December 2008; published 10 February 2009 Scatter correction is crucial to the quality of reconstructed images in x-ray cone-beam computed tomography CBCT. Most of existing scatter correction methods assume smooth scatter distribu- tions. The high-frequency scatter noise remains in the projection images even after a perfect scatter correction. In this paper, using a clinical CBCT system and a measurement-based scatter correction, the authors show that a scatter correction alone does not provide satisfactory image quality and the loss of the contrast-to-noise ratio CNR of the scatter corrected image may overwrite the benefit of scatter removal. To circumvent the problem and truly gain from scatter correction, an effective scatter noise suppression method must be in place. They analyze the noise properties in the pro- jections after scatter correction and propose to use a penalized weighted least-squares PWLS algorithm to reduce the noise in the reconstructed images. Experimental results on an evaluation phantom Catphan©600 show that the proposed algorithm further reduces the reconstruction error in a scatter corrected image from 10.6% to 1.7% and increases the CNR by a factor of 3.6. Significant image quality improvement is also shown in the results on an anthropomorphic phan- tom, in which the global noise level is reduced and the local streaking artifacts around bones are suppressed. © 2009 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.