Radiation Dose Reduction and CNR Enhancement in C-arm Cone Beam CT

摘要

In this work we applied dose reduction using the prior image constrained compress sensing (DR-PICCS) method on a C-arm cone beam CT system. DR-PICCS uses a smoothed image as the prior image. After applying DR-PICCS, the final image will have noise variance inherited from the prior image and spatial resolution from the projection data. In order to investigate the dose reduction of DR-PICCS, three different dose levels were used in C-arm scans of animal subjects using a Siemens Zeego C-arm system under an IACUC protocol. Image volumes were reconstructed using the standard FBP and DR-PICCS algorithms(total of 160 images). These images were randomly mixed and presented to three experienced interventional radiologists (each having more than twenty years reading experience) to review and score using a five-point scale. After statistical significance testing, the results show that DR-PICCS can achieve more than 60% dose reduction while keeping the same image quality. And if we compare FBP and DR-PICCS at the same dose level the results show that DR-PICCS will generate higher quality images.