Program Information
Ultrafast Cone-Beam CT Scatter Correction with GPU-Based Monte Carlo Simulation
Y Xu1,2*,T Bai1,3 ,H Yan1 , L Ouyang1 , J Wang1 , A Pompos1 , L Zhou2 , S Jiang1 , X Jia1 , (1) UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, (2) Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China,(3) Xi'an Jiaotong University,Xi'an,China
Presentations
TH-A-18C-4 Thursday 7:30AM - 9:30AM Room: 18CPurpose:Scatter artifacts severely degrade image quality of cone-beam CT (CBCT). We present an ultrafast scatter correction framework by using GPU-based Monte Carlo (MC) simulation and prior patient CT image, aiming at automatically finish the whole process including both scatter correction and reconstructions within 30 seconds.
Methods:The method consists of six steps: 1) FDK reconstruction using raw projection data; 2) Rigid Registration of planning CT to the FDK results; 3) MC scatter calculation at sparse view angles using the planning CT; 4) Interpolation of the calculated scatter signals to other angles; 5) Removal of scatter from the raw projections; 6) FDK reconstruction using the scatter-corrected projections. In addition to using GPU to accelerate MC photon simulations, we also use a small number of photons and a down-sampled CT image in simulation to further reduce computation time. A novel denoising algorithm is used to eliminate MC scatter noise caused by low photon numbers. The method is validated on head-and-neck cases with simulated and clinical data.
Results:We have studied impacts of photo histories, volume down sampling factors on the accuracy of scatter estimation. The Fourier analysis was conducted to show that scatter images calculated at 31 angles are sufficient to restore those at all angles with <0.1% error. For the simulated case with a resolution of 512x512x100, we simulated 10M photons per angle. The total computation time is 23.77 seconds on a Nvidia GTX Titan GPU. The scatter-induced shading/cupping artifacts are substantially reduced, and the average HU error of a region-of-interest is reduced from 75.9 to 19.0 HU. Similar results were found for a real patient case.
Conclusion:A practical ultrafast MC-based CBCT scatter correction scheme is developed. The whole process of scatter correction and reconstruction is accomplished within 30 seconds.
Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: This study is supported in part by NIH (1R01CA154747-01), The Core Technology Research in Strategic Emerging Industry, Guangdong, China(2011A081402003)
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