Moving metal artifact reduction in cone-beam CT scans with implanted cylindrical gold markers.

PURPOSE: Implanted gold markers for image-guided radiotherapy lead to streaking artifacts in cone-beam CT (CBCT) scans. Several methods for metal artifact reduction (MAR) have been published, but they all fail in scans with large motion. Here the authors propose and investigate a method for automatic moving metal artifact reduction (MMAR) in CBCT scans with cylindrical gold markers.

METHODS: The MMAR CBCT reconstruction method has six steps. (1) Automatic segmentation of the cylindrical markers in the CBCT projections. (2) Removal of each marker in the projections by replacing the pixels within a masked area with interpolated values. (3) Reconstruction of a marker-free CBCT volume from the manipulated CBCT projections. (4) Reconstruction of a standard CBCT volume with metal artifacts from the original CBCT projections. (5) Estimation of the three-dimensional (3D) trajectory during CBCT acquisition for each marker based on the segmentation in Step 1, and identification of the smallest ellipsoidal volume that encompasses 95% of the visited 3D positions. (6) Generation of the final MMAR CBCT reconstruction from the marker-free CBCT volume of Step 3 by replacing the voxels in the 95% ellipsoid with the corresponding voxels of the standard CBCT volume of Step 4. The MMAR reconstruction was performed retrospectively using a half-fan CBCT scan for 29 consecutive stereotactic body radiation therapy patients with 2-3 gold markers implanted in the liver. The metal artifacts of the MMAR reconstructions were scored and compared with a standard MAR reconstruction by counting the streaks and by calculating the standard deviation of the Hounsfield units in a region around each marker.

RESULTS: The markers were found with the same autosegmentation settings in 27 CBCT scans, while two scans needed slightly changed settings to find all markers automatically in Step 1 of the MMAR method. MMAR resulted in 15 scans with no streaking artifacts, 11 scans with 1-4 streaks, and 3 scans with severe streaking artifacts. The corresponding numbers for MAR were 8 (no streaks), 1 (1-4 streaks), and 20 (severe streaking artifacts). The MMAR method was superior to MAR in scans with more than 8 mm 3D marker motion and comparable to MAR for scans with less than 8 mm motion. In addition, the MMAR method was tested on a 4D CBCT reconstruction for which it worked equally well as for the 3D case. The markers in the 4D case had very low motion blur.

CONCLUSIONS: An automatic method for MMAR in CBCT scans was proposed and shown to effectively remove almost all streaking artifacts in a large set of clinical CBCT scans with implanted gold markers in the liver. Residual streaking artifacts observed in three CBCT scans may be removed with better marker segmentation.