Metal artifact suppression from reformatted projections in multi-slice helical CT using dual-front active contours.

Metallic implants may cause severe artifacts in CT exams. Suppression of metal artifacts remains to be a very challenging problem, in which metal region segmentation is one of the most important steps. We proposed a novel, semiautomatic segmentation algorithm based on the dual-front active contour model and the boundary mapping strategy to detect the metal regions on reformatted projection data, and to effectively eliminate/suppress metal artifacts on reconstructed images. Experimental studies on clinical hip and shoulder CT exams demonstrated that the proposed method was able to segment multiple metal implants more accurately relative to threshold-based methods. The artifacts caused by dense metal implants were better suppressed.