Improvement of Prior Image for Metal Artifact Reduction of Computed Tomography

doi:10.1007/s12204-023-2643-6

Abstract

Abstract: It is not easy to reduce the metal artifacts of computed tomography images. However, the pixel values inside the metal artifact regions vary smoothly, while those on the borders of the metal and the bone regions vary sharply. When the Canny operation by adaptive thresholding is conducted on the raw image, the almost continuous edges can be formed obviously on the borders of the metal and the bone regions, but this kind of information cannot be formed for the metal artifact regions. In this paper, by searching the closed areas formed by the border edges of the bone regions in the Canny image, the metal artifact regions, which are very difficult to discriminate only by intensity thresholding, can be excluded effectively. A novel prior image-based method is thus developed for metal artifact reduction. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can be realized easily and reduce the metal artifacts effectively even if multiple large metal objects exist simultaneously in the image. The method is suitable for the clinical application.

Key words: computed tomography image, metal artifact reduction, prior image

摘要： 降低计算机断层扫描图像中的金属伪影并不容易。然而，金属伪影区域内的像素值变化平滑，而金属和骨骼区域边界的像素值变化剧烈。对原始图像进行自适应阈值处理后，在金属区域和骨骼区域的边界上可以明显地形成几乎连续的边缘，而在金属伪影区域则无法形成这种信息。本文通过对Canny图像中骨骼区域边界边缘形成的封闭区域进行搜索，有效地排除了仅用强度阈值法难以识别的金属伪影区域。因此，提出了一种新的基于先验图像的金属伪影抑制方法。实验表明，即使图像中同时存在多个较大的金属物体，该方法也能轻松实现，有效地降低金属伪影。该方法适合临床应用。

关键词: 计算机断层扫描图像，金属伪影还原，先验图像

CLC Number:

Sun Wenwu, Zhuang Tiange, Chen Siping. Improvement of Prior Image for Metal Artifact Reduction of Computed Tomography[J]. J Shanghai Jiaotong Univ Sci, 2025, 30(3): 446-454.

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