PURPOSE:Artifacts in treatment-room cone-beam reconstructions have been observed at the authors' center when cone-beam acquisition is simultaneous with radio frequency (RF) transponder tracking using the Calypso 4D system (Calypso Medical, Seattle, WA).
These artifacts manifest as CT-number modulations and increased CT-noise. The authors present a method for the suppression of the artifacts.
METHODS: The authors propose a three-stage postprocessing technique that can be applied to image volumes previously reconstructed by a cone-beam system. The stages are (1) segmentation of voxels into air, soft-tissue, and bone; (2) application of a 2D spatial-filter in the axial plane to the soft-tissue voxels; and (3) normalization to remove streaking along the axial-direction. The algorithm was tested on patient data acquired with Synergy XVI cone-beam CT systems (Elekta, Crawley, United Kingdom).
RESULTS: The computational demands of the suggested correction are small, taking less than 15 s per cone-beam reconstruction on a desktop PC. For a moderate loss of spatial-resolution, the artifacts are strongly suppressed and low-contrast visibility is improved.
CONCLUSIONS: The correction technique proposed is fast and effective in removing the artifacts caused by simultaneous cone-beam imaging and RF-transponder tracking.
Written by:
Poludniowski G, Webb S, Evans PM. Are you the author?
Joint Department of Physics, Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, Surrey, UK.
Reference: Med Phys. 2012 Mar;39(3):1646-9.
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 22380396