Imaging characteristics of distance-driven method in a prototype cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT)

Abstract

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) has widely been used and studied in both medical imaging and radiation therapy. The aim of this study was to evaluate our newly developed CBCT system by implementing a distance-driven system modeling technique in order to produce excellent and accurate cross-sectional images. For the purpose of comparing the performance of the distance-driven methods, we also performed pixel-driven and ray-driven techniques when conducting forward- and back-projection schemes. We conducted the Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) algorithm and simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (SART) to retrieve a volumetric information of scanned chest phantom. The results indicated that contrast-to-noise (CNR) of the reconstructed images by using FDK and SART showed 8.02 and 15.78 for distance-driven, whereas 4.02 and 5.16 for pixel-driven scheme and 7.81 and 13.01 for ray-driven scheme, respectively. This could demonstrate that distance-driven method described more closely the chest phantom compared to pixel- and ray-driven. However, both elapsed time for modeling a system matrix and reconstruction time took longer time when performing the distance-driven scheme. Therefore, future works will be directed toward reducing computational time to acceptable limits for real applications.