Object and System Model generation for CT

April 11, 2012

Introduction

The Master Thesis Object and System Model Generation for X-ray Computed Tomography describes the design and implementation of a reconstruction framework for X-ray Computed Tomography. For that framework a modied distance-driven projector, the Vertex-based Distance-Driven Projector, is used as the projection model and as the reconstruction algorithm the Separable Paraboloidal Surrogates (SPS) method is used. The motivation of the work is to improve CT reconstructions by integrating the object structure in the reconstruction process. As dierent structures behave dierently during the reconstruction process the information of the these structures could make it possible to address problems in the beam hardening eect, which comes from high intensity structures, and improve the quality of the reconstruction in soft tissue, which details are usually harder to reconstruct. The thesis further briey describes the general background of CT from the basic principles, physics and design to reconstruction methods and projection models. Some general problems in CT reconstruction as well as some related work is also described, before the details of the Vertex-based Distance-Driven Projector and the implementation of the framework are specied. In the last part results generated with the framework are presented together with some conclusions about the work.

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2.1

Used Methods and Implementation

Projection Model

In the reconstruction process a volume of interest is discretized into voxels which will be assigned values that represent the average density in that voxel. In order to do that a model for the projection of the x-rays onto the detector panel is required. For this work the so called Vertex-based Distance-driven Projector is used. As each projection is a planar image of the object that is examined the object is rst discretized into square pixels. The contribution of each pixel to the detector elements is obtained over a combination of the percentage of detection and projection of the pixel. By using the shadow a pixel throws on the detector elements the percentage of projection can be computed. This can be done by simply intersecting the four rays connecting the source and the corners a pixel with the detector. However as not all detectors are at but also curved the computations for such detectors becomes much more dicult. For the computation of the shadow a virtual line that is xed to be parallel to the x-axis of a coordinate system not specied is introduced. The four rays are intersected with the line and with the two outer rays the bounds of the shadow are obtained on that line. Similarly the detector elements are also projected onto that line. With both projections the covered detector elements and their percentage of coverage can be retrieved. In addition the percentage of the pixel covering one detector element is computed by intersecting the rays from the detector elements with the pixel. That way the pixel is divided into areas and the percentage of each area to the whole pixel is then the percentage of projection for the corresponding detector element. As the computation of the real area is to time consuming it is just approximated with two lengths. The rst is the obtained by taking the percentage of the length of the pixel in one dimension that represents the coverage of the pixel in one detector element on the virtual line compared to the whole coverage of the pixel on the virtual line. The second length used for the approximation is the length through the pixel along a ray. The ray used is the ray connecting the source and the middle of a detector element and the length is obtained over the projection angle. With this two lengths the covered area of the pixel is then approximated.

2.2

Beam hardening correction

In addition a new beam hardening correction method is used. The idea of that method is that beam hardening eects can be regarded as shadows behind the bones where there is only homogeneous soft tissue. By assuming all such shadows are beam hardening eects the image could be corrected by separating all shadows in the image. This is done by performing a rst rough reconstruction and segmenting it into three dierent intensity regions. With a forward projection of that image we get a sinogram which is then compared to the original sinogram. The dierence

of the sinograms then gives a measure for the probability of a beam hardening eect taking place in the reconstruction and can be used to generate another sinogram. The high intensity parts of that sinogram are used to identify which projections are related to bones and which arent to correct the beam hardening eect in the nal reconstruction.

2.3

Convergence control

As high intensity regions like bones converge faster in the reconstruction than low intensity regions like soft tissue a relaxation map is proposed for convergence control. The relaxation maps stores values for the relaxation factor in the reconstruction process for dierent regions which are obtained from the segmentation also used for the beam hardening correction.

2.4

Implementation

The Reconstruction Framework with the proposed methods was rst implemented in Matlab and then an accelerated version was implemented as a library in C++ using only standard librarys for portability reasons. As input the Framework requires a settings le which is a text le in some format dened by others which is not specied. The input and output data are simple binary les with the data as a one dimensional array.

Results

The proposed methods were evaluated in Monte Carlo Simulations and real patient data. For the simulations the generated images are compared to the ground truth of the simulation settings. As a measure for the evaluation of the beam hardening correction a modied Relative Standard Deviation, the Range Relative Standard Deviation (RRSD) is used, the dierence is however not specied. In low intensity regions the RRSD shows no dierence between the corrected and not corrected reconstructions which was expected as no beam hardening should occur in the regions. In medium intensity regions the corrected images have a lower RRSD with the dierence to the non corrected reconstructions increasing with the number of iterations used in the reconstruction process. For the high intensity regions there is a clear dierence after the rst iteration, however after several iterations the not corrected reconstruction is starting to get lower RRSD values than the corrected ones. For the real patient data one CT slice was used. As it was acquired with a cone-beam CT only the data from the center slice was taken and treated as data from a fan-beam CT. The results on the patient data however showed no improvement of the reconstruction using the proposed beam hardening correction method. In addition the performance of the convergence control was tested on both the simulated and the patient data. As a measure of performance the residue summation after each iteration of the reconstruction is used. With relaxation factors of 0.8, 1 and 1.2 used in the relaxation map compared to a global relaxation factor of 1 the residue sum is smaller after each iteration in the reconstruction using the relaxation map. For the patient data relaxation factors of 0.9, 1.1 and 1.2 were used in the relaxation map. The sum of residue is slightly lower in the rst iterations, but the dierence to the reconstruction with the global relaxation factor gets smaller after each iteration until there is no dierence. In a dierence image of the reconstruction using the relaxation map and the standard reconstruction dierences can be seen along the edges. However if these dierence really illustrate an improvement is not evaluated.

Conclusions

The proposed projection model, the Vertex-based Distance-driven Projector seems to work and could have some improvements compared to the normal distance driven projector however that was not evaluated. A combination with the separable footprint projector might be an improvement of both algorithms and could be subject for future work. For the beam hardening correction in simulated data some slight improvements were achieved for medium intensity structures. In the high intensity regions its behavior seems to be two-sided as it rst improves the results but then performs worse than reconstructions without correction. By adjusting the correction strength during the iterations the correction method could still be used to improve the reconstruction, however for that a method for the adjustment has to be found so this was not tested yet. In the patient data the beam hardening correction mainly fails due to the complexity of the human body where it is dicult to get a good segmentation of dierent intensity structures. Both the beam hardening correction and the convergence control would benet from better segmentation algorithms as they stand and fall with the quality of the segmentation. For the master thesis a whole reconstruction framework for CT was implemented with three interesting new methods for the reconstruction process, this is more than adequate for a Master Thesis. The method for beam hardening correction seems to fail at this stage, but might work when the method is investigated more thoroughly than it was possible in the scope of this thesis. The method for convergence control gives nice initial results but would also be

subject for further development before real claims about its performance could be made. The projection model was unfortunately not compared with other models, its development, implementation and thorough evaluation would have made a good master thesis on its own. This thesis however dealt on a number of subjects which seem to be enough for at least two theses. Apart from some missing details in the thesis it is a very good work but would have been better if it would have been more focused on one topic.