A cone-beam tomography system with a reduced size planar detector: A backprojection-filtration reconstruction algorithm as well as numerical and practical experiments

In a traditional cone-beam computed tomography (CT) system, the cost of product and computation is very high. In this paper, we develop a transversely truncated cone-beam X-ray CT system with a reduced-size detector positioned off-center, in which X-ray beams only cover half of the object. The existing filtered backprojection (FBP) or backprojection-filtration (BPF) algorithms are not directly applicable in this new system. Hence, we develop a BPF-type direct backprojection algorithm. Different from the traditional rebinning methods, our algorithm directly backprojects the pretreated projection data without rebinning. This makes the algorithm compact and computationally more efficient. Because of avoiding interpolation errors of rebinning process, higher spatial resolution is obtained. Finally, some numerical simulations and practical experiments are done to validate the proposed algorithm and compare with rebinning algorithm.