Empirical binary tomography calibration (EBTC) for the precorrection of beam hardening and scatter for flat panel CT

Abstract

Scatter and beam hardening are prominent artifacts in x-ray CT. Currently, there is no precorrection method that inherently accounts for tube voltage modulation and shaped prefiltration. A method for self-calibration based on binary tomography of homogeneous objects, which was proposed by B. Li et al. ["A novel beam hardening correction method for computed tomography," in Proceedings of the IEEE/ICME International Conference on Complex Medical Engineering CME 2007, pp. 891-895, 23-27 May 2007], has been generalized in order to use this information to preprocess scans of other, nonbinary objects, e.g., to reduce artifacts in medical CT applications. Further on, the method was extended to handle scatter besides beam hardening and to allow for detector pixel-specific and ray-specific precorrections. This implies that the empirical binary tomography calibration (EBTC) technique is sensitive to spectral effects as they are induced by the heel effect, by shaped prefiltration, or by scanners with tube voltage modulation. The presented method models the beam hardening correction by using a rational function, while the scatter component is modeled using the pep model of B. Ohnesorge et al. ["Efficient object scatter correction algorithm for third and fourth generation CT scanners," Eur. Radiol. 9(3), 563-569 (1999)]. A smoothness constraint is applied to the parameter space to regularize the underdetermined system of nonlinear equations. The parameters determined are then used to precorrect CT scans. EBTC was evaluated using simulated data of a flat panel cone-beam CT scanner with tube voltage modulation and bow-tie prefiltration and using real data of a flat panel cone-beam CT scanner. In simulation studies, where the ground truth is known, the authors' correction model proved to be highly accurate and was able to reduce beam hardening by 97% and scatter by about 75%. Reconstructions of measured data showed significantly less artifacts than the standard reconstruction. EBTC appears to be an efficient algorithm to precorrect CT raw data for beam hardening and scatter and it can account for ray-dependent spectral variations as they occur due to the heel effect, due to shaped prefiltration, or due to variations in tube voltage.