Orthopaedic and non-orthopaedic applications of a single-energy iterative metal artefact reduction technique and other metal artefact reduction techniques explained.

Abstract

Metal within the CT field of view causes artefact that degrades the diagnostic quality of the processed images. This is related to the high atomic number of most metals and is due to a combination of beam hardening, scatter, edge effects and photon starvation. Both software and hardware metal artefact reduction (MAR) techniques have been developed. Iterative reconstruction software MAR techniques can be applied on raw CT data sets and show improved image quality in the setting of sparse projection data when compared with filtered back-projection methods. Recently, a novel single-energy iterative metal artefact reduction technique (IMART) was released for use with large orthopaedic devices. The aim of this pictorial essay was to demonstrate the usefulness of IMART in the setting of both orthopaedic and non-orthopaedic metallic objects and devices.