Exact and efficient cone-beam reconstruction algorithm for a short-scan circle combined with various lines

X-ray 3D rotational angiography based on C-arm systems has become a versatile and established tomographic imaging modality for high contrast objects in interventional environment. Improvements in data acquisition, e.g. by use of flat panel detectors, will enable C-arm systems to resolve even low-contrast details. However, further progress will be limited by the incompleteness of data acquisition on the conventional short-scan circular source trajectories. Cone artifacts, which result from that incompleteness, significantly degrade image quality by severe smearing and shading. To assure data completeness a combination of a partial circle with one or several line segments is investigated. A new and efficient reconstruction algorithm is deduced from a general inversion formula based on 3D Radon theory. The method is theoretically exact, possesses shift-invariant filtered backprojection (FBP) structure, and solves the long object problem. The algorithm is flexible in dealing with various circle and line configurations. The reconstruction method requires nothing more than the theoretically minimum length of scan trajectory. It consists of a conventional short-scan circle and a line segment approximately twice as long as the height of the region-of-interest. Geometrical deviations from the ideal source trajectory are considered in the implementation in order to handle data of real C-arm systems. Reconstruction results show excellent image quality free of cone artifacts. The proposed scan trajectory and reconstruction algorithm assure excellent image quality and allow low-contrast tomographic imaging with C-arm based cone-beam systems. The method can be implemented without any hardware modifications on systems commercially available today.