A nonlinear scaling‐based normalized metal artifact reduction to reduce low‐frequency artifacts in energy‐integrating and photon‐counting CT

AbstractBackgroundMetal within the scan plane can cause severe artifacts when reconstructing X‐ray computed tomography (CT) scans. Both in clinical use and recent research, normalized metal artifact reduction (NMAR) has established as the reference method for correcting metal artifacts, but NMAR introduces inconsistencies within the sinogram, which can cause additional low‐frequency artifacts after image reconstruction.PurposeThis paper introduces an extension to NMAR by applying a nonlinear scaling function (NLS‐NMAR) to reduce low‐frequency artifacts, which get introduced by the reconstruction of interpolation‐edge‐related sinogram inconsistencies in the normalized sinogram domain.MethodsAfter linear interpolation of the metal trace, an NLS function is applied in the prior‐normalized sinogram domain to reduce the impact of the interpolation edges during filtered backprojection. After sinogram denormalization and image reconstruction, the low frequencies of the NLS image are combined with different high frequencies to restore anatomic details. An anthropomorphic dental phantom with removable metal inserts was utilized on two different CT systems to quantitatively assess the artifact reduction performance in terms of HU deviations and the root‐mean‐square‐error within relevant regions of interest. Clinical dental examples were assessed to qualitatively demonstrate the problem of the interpolation‐related blooming as well as to demonstrate the performance of the NLS function to reduce respective artifacts. To quantitatively prove HU consistency, HU values were assessed in central ROIs in the clinical cases. In addition, single clinical cases of a hip replacement and pedicle screws in the spine are shown to demonstrate the method's results in other body regions.ResultsThe NLS‐NMAR can minimize the effect of interpolation‐related sinogram inconsistencies and thus reduce resulting hyperdense blooming artifacts. In the phantom results, the reconstructions with the NLS‐NMAR‐corrected low frequencies demonstrate the lowest error. In the qualitative assessment of the clinical data, the NLS‐NMAR shows a tremendous enhancement in image quality, also performing best within all assessed images series.ConclusionThe NLS‐NMAR provides a small yet effective extension to conventional NMAR by reducing low‐frequency hyperdense metal trace‐interpolation‐related artifacts in computed tomography.