GPU-based Cone-beam Reconstruction Using Wavelet Denoising

The scattering noise artifact resulted in low-dose projection in repetitive cone-beam CT (CBCT) scans decreases the image quality and lessens the accuracy of the diagnosis. To improve the image quality of low-dose CT imaging, the statistical filtering is more effective in noise reduction. However, image filtering and enhancement during the entire reconstruction process exactly may be challenging due to high performance computing. The general reconstruction algorithm for CBCT data is the filtered back-projection, which for a volume of 512x512x512 takes up to a few minutes on a standard system. To speed up reconstruction, massively parallel architecture of current graphical processing unit (GPU) is a platform suitable for acceleration of mathematical calculation. In this paper, we focus on accelerating wavelet denoising and Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) back-projection using parallel processing on GPU, utilize compute unified device architecture (CUDA) platform and implement CBCT reconstruction based on CUDA technique. Finally, we evaluate our implementation on clinical tooth data sets. Resulting implementation of wavelet denoising is able to process a 1024x1024 image within 2 ms, except data loading process, and our GPU-based CBCT implementation reconstructs a 512x512x512 volume from 400 projection data in less than 1 minute.