Recent developments in large-area flat-panel detectors have made tomosynthesis technology revisited in multiplanar xray imaging. However, the typical shift-and-add (SAA) or backprojection reconstruction method is notably claimed by a lack of sharpness in the reconstructed images because of blur artifact which is the superposition of objects which are out of planes. In this study, we have devised an intuitive simple method to reduce the blur artifact based on an iterative approach. This method repeats a forward and backward projection procedure to determine the blur artifact affecting on the plane-of-interest (POI), and then subtracts it from the POI. The proposed method does not include any Fourierdomain operations hence excluding the Fourier-domain-originated artifacts. We describe the concept of the self-layer subtractive tomosynthesis and demonstrate its performance with numerical simulation and experiments. Comparative analysis with the conventional methods, such as the SAA and filtered backprojection methods, is addressed.

Date Published: 23 March 2010
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 7622, Medical Imaging 2010: Physics of Medical Imaging, 76225J (23 March 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.844137

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7622:
Medical Imaging 2010: Physics of Medical Imaging
Ehsan Samei; Norbert J. Pelc, Editor(s)