A curve-filtered FDK (C-FDK) reconstruction algorithm for circular cone-beam CT

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Li, Liang^; | Xing, Yuxiang^; | Chen, Zhiqiang^; | Zhang, Li^; | Kang, Kejun^;

Affiliations: Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China | Key Laboratory of Particle & Radiation Imaging (Tsinghua University), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: liliang02@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn

Abstract: Circular cone-beam CT is one of the most popular configurations in both medical and industrial applications. The FDK algorithm is the most popular method for circular cone-beam CT. However, with increasing cone-angle the cone-beam artifacts associated with the FDK algorithm deteriorate because the circular trajectory does not satisfy the data sufficiency condition. Along with an experimental evaluation and verification, this paper proposed a curve-filtered FDK (C-FDK) algorithm. First, cone-parallel projections are rebinned from the native cone-beam geometry in two separate directions. C-FDK rebins and filters projections along different curves from T-FDK in the centrally virtual detector plane. Then, numerical experiments are done to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing with both FDK and T-FDK reconstruction. Without any other extra trajectories supplemental to the circular orbit, C-FDK has a visible image quality improvement.

Keywords: Cone-beam CT, Image reconstruction, FDK, C-FDK, Cone-angle

DOI: 10.3233/XST-2011-0299

Journal: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 355-371, 2011