Windmill artifact in multi-slice helical CT

Multi-slice helical CT-systems suffer from windmill artifacts: black/white patterns that spin off of features with high, longitudinal gradients. The number of black/white pairs matches the number of slices (detector rows) in the multi-slice detector. The period of the spin is the same as the helical pitch. We investigate the cause of the pattern by following the traces of selected voxels, through the multi-slice detector array as a function of view position. This forms an "extracted sinogram" which represents the data used to reconstruct that specific voxel. Now we can determine the cause of the artifact by correlating the windmill streak in the image with the extracted data. The investigation shows that inadequate sampling along the longitudinal direction causes the artifact.