Potential of iterative reconstruction for maxillofacial cone beam CT imaging: technical note

Iterative reconstruction has been proven to be an effective tool for low-dose computed tomography imaging. However, this technology is currently not available in commercial diagnostic maxillofacial cone beam CT. For this technical note, an iterative reconstruction technique was applied to cone beam CT raw data of two maxillofacial clinical cases to explore its potential for dose reduction and metal artifact reduction. Low-dose imaging was emulated by using only fractions of the clinical projection dataset. The reconstruction algorithms tested were filtered backprojection (FBP) as a reference method, and a total variation minimization (TV) regularized ordered subsets convex (OSC-TV) method as the iterative technique. Upon qualitative examination, the OSC-TV technique was found to conserve most diagnostic information using half the projections. Test images have also shown that at 1/4 of the projections, OSC-TV was more robust than FBP with respect to streaking and metal artifacts.