The short-scan trajectory in cone-beam CT (CBCT) imaging effectively decreases the scan time and the patient dose by excluding the redundant measurements. Also, the offset scan geometry improves the efficacy of the detector utilization by achieving the larger field-of-view (FOV) than the normal use. However, the asymmetric HU value recovery in the sinus of the patient has been consistently observed whenever we use the short-scan trajectory with offset detector. Typically, the reconstruction of short-scan CBCT with an offset detector may lead to inaccuracies in the CT attenuation values within the reconstructed image. This is particularly noticeable away from the beam center due to insufficient data consistency. Also, other physical factors (ex) beam-hardening, scattering effect) and truncation artifact due to the small FOV may contribute to asymmetric sinus representation. In this study, we investigate the potential causes of the asymmetric sinus representation through the artifact study. We used a Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation to reproduce asymmetric HU value for the ease artifact study.
KEYWORDS: Computed tomography, Medical imaging, Denoising, Image sharpness, Education and training, Image quality, Tunable filters, Image restoration, Image filtering, Signal to noise ratio
Self-supervised learning for CT image denoising is a promising technique because it does not require clean target data that are usually unavailable in the clinic. Noise2void (N2V) is one of the famous methods to denoise the image without paired target data and it has been used to denoise optical images and also medical images such as MRI, and CT. However, the performance of the N2V is still limited due to the restricted receptive field of the network and it decreases the prediction performance for CT images that have complex image context and non-uniform Poisson random noise. Thus, we proposed enhanced N2V that utilizes penalty-driven network optimization to further denoise the images while preserving the important details. We used the total variation term to further denoise the image and also the laplacian pyramids term to preserve the important edges of the image. The degree of the influence of each penalty term is controlled by the hyperparameter value and they are optimized to achieve the best image quality in terms of noise level and structure sharpness. For the experiment, the real dental CBCT projection data were used to train the network in the projection domain. After the network training, the test results were reconstructed and compared at each different dose level. Meanwhile, PSNR, SNR, and a line profile were also evaluated to quantitatively compare the original FDK images, and proposed method. In conclusion, the proposed method achieved further denoises the image than N2V even preserving the details. By penalty-driven optimization, the network was able to learn the spectral features of the image while still the receptive field is limited to avoid identity mapping. We hope that our method would increase the practical utility of network-based CT images denoising that usually the target data are unavailable.
Often, the artifacts caused by high-density objects degrade the quality of the image with streaks and information loss in CT imaging. In recent years, machine learning has proven itself a powerful tool to resolve some of the challenges faced in reducing metal artifacts. In this work, a novel method of metal artifact reduction (MAR) without metal segmentation by using a CNN network is proposed. The approach focuses on removing the need for the sensitive metal segmentation step to improve robustness and aims to tackle beam hardening directly in the sinogram domain. In the proposed method, we trained the network with sinogram pairs that include metal objects and those that include virtual non-metal (VNM) replacement objects. A VNM object is designed to be less dense than metal but more dense than soft tissue. The novelty of this method lies in the sinogram-to-sinogram training without the need for metal segmentation by replacing the metal object to a virtual non-metal object in the sinogram to reduce beam hardening and successfully compensate for the information loss.
In the production of display screen modules, multi-faceted quality control is performed. One of the processes is detection of defects on and between module components such as particles, scratches and air bubbles using a 3D optical microscope. Technicians view a stack of images of potential defect areas and make a qualitative assessment of the sample. However, this is made difficult by the artifacts in the unfocused image layers. Moreover, there is a large discrepancy in the detection tendencies of the technicians. In order to standardize and automate the classification of major and minor defects in products, we propose a convolutional neural network based binary classification that makes use of the normal angle and oblique angle images. The decision factors affecting the classification of the sample include defect position, size, and shape. In order to reflect these factors, the microscopic images of the sample are taken in varying focal depths from normal and oblique angles. Then, the maximum intensity projection (MaxIP) and minimum intensity projection (MinIP) in the xy, yz, xz plane are created. The set of MaxIP and MinIP are used to train a modified VGG-network. Each plane differs in size, so MaxIP and MinIP of every plane was independently added as input to the network and were concatenated in the fully connected layer. Being that the dataset used for this work composed of 185 major defect samples and 2036 minor defect samples, augmentation was essential. In order to even out the major and minor defect sample ratio, random affine transformation was performed on the major defect sample images. The proposed method of binary classification performs with a total accuracy of 98.6%.
In this study, we aim to separate the ghost artifacts from the limited angle CT image by using Robust Principle Component Analysis (RPCA) and thus improve the reconstructed CT images. Conventionally, RPCA method separates the foreground and the background. Often, the background is assumed as static or quasi-static. When applied to limited angle CT images, the artifacts are considered as quasi-static background whereas the anatomical structures are considered foreground. Thus, RPCA is performed to segment the foreground from the background. Finally, different post-reconstruction de-noising parameters are applied to each foreground and background to remove the artifact effectively.
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