Author: Zhiqiang Chen, Hewei Gao, Li Zhang, Guoxi Zhu 👨🔬
Affiliation: Tsinghua University 🌍
Purpose: Spectral cone-beam CT has better performance in material identification and quantitative analysis compared to single-energy cone-beam CT. However, X-ray scattering introduces significant scatter artifacts in images, leading to reductions in image quality and inaccuracies in material density. Therefore, an accurate fast fast scatter correction method is essential.
Methods: Scatter methods methods based on linear Boltzmann transport equation (LBTE) have been proven to provide fast and accurate scatter correction for cone-beam CT.In this work, we introduce a new label dimension in LBTE (LBTE-L) to mark different spectra, which can calculate scatter signals at multiple different spectra in a single computation and speed up the calculation by reusing some variables.
Results: We implemented the LBTE program and the acceleration strategy on the computer. The LBTE-L method has an advantage in cost times whenever there are more than one spectrum compared to the conventional LBTE. We use this method to do scatter correction on a head phantom, and the results show that the method effectively reduce the scatter artifacts and obtain the correct material decomposition results.
Conclusion: In conclusion, we propose and validate an acceleration strategy for the scatter correction methods based on LBTE used in spectral CBCT. This strategy can improve the calculation speed of LBTE in the case of more than one spectrum, and it performs well when used in scatter correction for a head phantom and multi-energy phantom.