Investigation of cone-beam CT image quality trade-off for image-guided radiation therapy

Junguo Bian, Gregory C. Sharp, Yang Kyun Park, Jinsong Ouyang, Thomas Bortfeld, Georges El Fakhri

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

It is well-known that projections acquired over an angular range slightly over 180° (so-called short scan) are sufficient for fan-beam reconstruction. However, due to practical imaging conditions (projection data and reconstruction image discretization, physical factors, and data noise), the short-scan reconstructions may have different appearances and properties from the full-scan (scans over 360°) reconstructions. Nevertheless, short-scan configurations have been used in applications such as cone-beam CT (CBCT) for head-neck-cancer image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) that only requires a small field of view due to the potential reduced imaging time and dose. In this work, we studied the image quality trade-off for full, short, and full/short scan configurations with both conventional filtered-backprojection (FBP) reconstruction and iterative reconstruction algorithms based on total-variation (TV) minimization for head-neck-cancer IGRT. Anthropomorphic and Catphan phantoms were scanned at different exposure levels with a clinical scanner used in IGRT. Both visualization- and numerical-metric-based evaluation studies were performed. The results indicate that the optimal exposure level and number of views are in the middle range for both FBP and TV-based iterative algorithms and the optimization is object-dependent and task-dependent. The optimal view numbers decrease with the total exposure levels for both FBP and TV-based algorithms. The results also indicate there are slight differences between FBP and TV-based iterative algorithms for the image quality trade-off: FBP seems to be more in favor of larger number of views while the TV-based algorithm is more robust to different data conditions (number of views and exposure levels) than the FBP algorithm. The studies can provide a general guideline for image-quality optimization for CBCT used in IGRT and other applications.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number3317
Pages (from-to)3317-3346
Number of pages30
JournalPhysics in medicine and biology
Volume61
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 1 2016

Keywords

  • cone-beam CT
  • image-guided radiation therapy
  • optimization-based image reconstruction

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Radiological and Ultrasound Technology
  • Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging

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