Reduction of artifacts in dental cone beam CT images to improve the three dimensional image reconstruction

Abstract

Cone-beam CT (CBCT) scanners are based on volumetric tomography, using a 2D extended digital array providing an area detector [1,2]. Compared to traditional CT, CBCT has many advantages, such as less X-ray beam limitation, and rapid scan time, etc. However, in CBCT images the x-ray beam has lower mean kilovolt (peak) energy, so the metal artifact is more pronounced on. The position of the shadowed region in other views can be tracked by projecting the 3D coordinates of the object. Automatic image segmentation was used to replace the pixels inside the metal object with the boundary pixels. The modified projection data, using synthetically Radon Transformation, were then used to reconstruct a new back projected CBCT image. In this paper, we present a method, based on the morphological, area and pixel operators, which we applied on the Radon transformed image, to reduce the metal artifacts in CBCT, then we built the Radon back project images using the radon invers transformation. The artifacts effects on the 3d-reconstruction is that, the soft tissues appears as bones or teeth. For the preprocessing of the CBCT images, two methods are used to recognize the noisy black areas that the first depends on thresholding and closing algorithm, and the second depends on tracing boundaries after using thresholding algorithm too. The intensity of these areas is the lowest in the image than other tissues, so we profit this property to detect the edges of these areas. These two methods are applied on phantom and patient image data. It deals with reconstructed CBCT dicom images and can effectively reduce such metal artifacts. Due to the data of the constructed images are corrupted by these metal artifacts, qualitative and quantitative analysis of CBCT images is very essential.