Metal Artifact Correction Based on Combination of 2D and 3D Region Growing for X-ray Tomosynthesis

We propose a new metal artifact correction method for the X-ray digital tomosynthesis by accurately detecting metal in the projection data. We combined 3D region growing for growing a few points in the metal to other projection angles and 2D region growing for growing the points further in order not to force the user to set the starting points at each projection angle. We compared the proposed method with the conventional FBP. In the phantom experiment with a mimicked artificial joint using the proposed method, the metal artifacts around the metal object were reduced. At the distance within 5 mm from the metal object, the root mean square errors evaluated with the conventional and proposed methods were 2700 and 200, respectively, and the root mean square errors improvement of more than 90% was demonstrated. When the distance from the metal object was shorter, the metal artifact became more significant in the conventional method, and the effectiveness of the proposed metal artifact correction was higher.