Metal artifact reduction in dual energy CT by sinogram segmentation based on active contour model and TV inpainting

In dual energy computerized tomography (DECT) which is widely used in industrial areas and security inspection, metal artifact reduction (MAR) is a troublesome problem. Pronounced streaks appear in the atomic number reconstruction and the value appears to be highly inaccurate when metal objects are present. In this article, a practical MAR method for DECT is proposed. Firstly, sinogram segmentation based on active contour model is implemented to obtain the metal projection region (MPR). Then, TV inpainting for sinogram was applied before reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that, with our MAR method, the accuracy and image quality of the atomic number can be greatly improved.