Dual-rotation C-arm cone-beam tomographic acquisition and reconstruction frameworks for low-contrast detection in brain soft-tissue imaging

Overview & Synopsis

Interventional C-arm systems are real-time X-ray imaging systems, that can perform tomographic acquisitions by rotating the C-arm around the patient ; however, C-arm cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) achieves a lower contrast resolution than diagnostic CT, which is necessary in order to benefit from the clinical information of soft tissues in the brain. We propose a new C-arm CBCT acquisition and reconstruction framework to increase low-contrast detection in brain soft-tissue imaging. In order to emulate a bow-tie filter, a dualrotation acquisition is proposed. To account for all the specificities of the dual-rotation acquisition, a dedicated iterative reconstruction algorithm is designed, that includes the ramp filter in the cost function. By switching from filtered backprojection (FBP) to backprojection-filtration (BPF) reconstruction methods, we propose an alternative, direct reconstruction method for dual-rotation acquisitions. For single-rotation acquisitions, the method ensures to perform as good as FBP with arbitrarily coarse angular sampling in planar geometries, and provides a different approximation from the Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) algorithm in the cone-beam geometry. Although we used it to emulate a virtual bow-tie, our dual-rotation acquisition framework is intrinsically related to region-of-interest (ROI) imaging through the truncated acquisition. With few or no modification of the proposed reconstruction methods, we successfully addressed the problem of ROI imaging in the context of dual-rotation acquisitions.