Caroline Golden National Univ. of Ireland Galway (Ireland) Samuel R. Mazin,F. Edward Boas,Grace Tye,Pejman Ghanouni,Garry Gold,Marc Sofilos,Norbert J. Pelc Stanford Univ. (United States)
Streak artifacts caused by the presence of metal have been a significant problem in CT imaging since its inception in
1972. With the fast evolving medical device industry, the number of metal objects implanted in patients is increasing
annually. This correlates directly with an increased likelihood of encountering metal in a patient CT scan, thus
necessitating the need for an effective and reproducible metal artifact reduction (MAR) algorithm. Previous comparisons
between MAR algorithms have typically only evaluated a small number of patients and a limited range of metal
implants. Although the results of many methods are promising, the reproducibility of these results is key to
providing more tangible evidence of their effectiveness. This study presents a direct comparison between the
performances, assessed by board certified radiologists, of four MAR algorithms: 3 non-iterative and one iterative
method, all applied and compared to the original clinical images. The results of the evaluation indicated a negative mean
score in almost all uses for two of the non-iterative methods, signifying an overall decrease in the diagnostic quality of
the images, generally due to perceived loss of detail. One non-iterative algorithm showed a slight improvement. The
iterative algorithm was superior in all studies by producing a considerable improvement in all uses.
Caroline Golden,
Samuel R. Mazin,
F. Edward Boas,
Grace Tye,
Pejman Ghanouni,
Garry Gold,
Marc Sofilos,
Norbert J. Pelc,
"A comparison of four algorithms for metal artifact reduction in CT
imaging", Proc. SPIE 7961, Medical Imaging 2011: Physics of Medical Imaging, 79612Y (16 March 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.878896; https://doi.org/10.1117/12.878896
Caroline Golden, Samuel R. Mazin, F. Edward Boas, Grace Tye, Pejman Ghanouni, Garry Gold, Marc Sofilos, Norbert J. Pelc, "A comparison of four algorithms for metal artifact reduction in CT
imaging," Proc. SPIE 7961, Medical Imaging 2011: Physics of Medical Imaging, 79612Y (16 March 2011);