A method based on interpolation for metal artifacts reduction in CT images

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Gu, Jian-wei | Zhang, Li | Chen, Zhi-qiang | Xing, Yu-xiang | Huang, Zhi-feng

Affiliations: Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, P.R. China. E-mails: {gujianwei99,xingyx,huangzhif97}@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn, {zhangli,chenzhiqiang}@nuctech.com

Abstract: X-ray CT plays a great role both in medical fields and in industrial nondestructive tests. In imaging, metal objects absorb X-rays greatly, which introduces streaks on reconstructed images. In this paper, we propose a method for metal artifacts reduction. Firstly, the metal projection region is accurately identified and an interpolation method based on such identification is applied to get the projection data without metal. The image excluding metal is reconstructed from the modified projection data. Secondly, the image without metal is combined with the image of metal to form a complete reconstruction. Numerical simulations and a phantom experiment demonstrate that the metal artifacts can be effectively suppressed using our method and the reconstructed image is more accurate in depicting the details of cross-sections, especially in the immediate neighborhood of the metal object. The proposed method is computationally efficient and can be easily adapted to current commercial CT scanners.

Keywords: X-ray CT, metal artifacts reduction (MAR), interpolation method

Journal: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 11-19, 2006