Affiliations: School of Engineering, Cranfield University,
Bedfordshire, UK | Department of Nuclear Medicine, KU Leuven, Leuven,
Belgium | Medical Imaging Research Center, KU Leuven, Leuven,
Belgium
Note: [] Corresponding author: Andre Mouton, School of Engineering,
Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, UK. E-mail: a.mouton@cranfield.ac.uk
Abstract: We present a survey of techniques for the reduction of streaking
artefacts caused by metallic objects in X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) images.
A comprehensive review of the existing state-of-the-art Metal Artefact
Reduction (MAR) techniques, drawn predominantly from the medical CT literature,
is supported by an experimental comparison of twelve MAR techniques. The
experimentation is grounded in an evaluation based on a standard scientific
comparison protocol for MAR methods, using a software generated medical phantom
image as well as a clinical CT scan. The experimentation is extended by
considering novel applications of CT imagery consisting of metal objects in
non-tissue surroundings acquired from the aviation security screening domain.
We address the shortage of thorough performance analyses in the existing MAR
literature by conducting a qualitative as well as quantitative comparative
evaluation of the selected techniques. We find that the difficulty in
generating accurate priors to be the predominant factor limiting the
effectiveness of the state-of-the-art medical MAR techniques when applied to
non-medical CT imagery. This study thus extends previous works by: comparing
several state-of-the-art MAR techniques; considering both medical and
non-medical applications and performing a thorough performance analysis,
considering both image quality as well as computational demands.
Keywords: Medical CT, security CT, Metal Artefact Reduction (MAR)
