Fourier-based Reduction of Directed Streak Artifacts in Cone-Beam CT

Zusammenfassung

Due to its adjustable scan trajectory, C-arm cone-beam CT has been used recently to acquire knee scans in an upright position. However, stabilization devices located outside the FOV introduce streak artifacts in the reconstructed images. This paper proposes a method to remove those streak artifacts. Using selective filtering of the Fourier transforms of the reconstructions, we propose a filter design that attenuates the frequencies that are responsible for the streak artifacts. The filter is constructed by taking both the frequency and the orientation of the introduced streaks into account. We compare our approach to a bandpass-filter. Our proposed method is able to reduce the streaks in the reconstruction remarkably while preserving edge information, whereas the bandpass-filter is not capable of preserving sharp edges in the filtered image. Moreover, our method yields an improved SSIM when comparing both filter techniques to simulated ground truth data.