Three Dimensional Image Guided Extrapolation for Cone-Beam CT Image Reconstruction

In cone-beam CT the range of projection views measured for each given image voxel is spatially variant. In the corners of the image volume there is less projection data available to be used by the image reconstruction algorithm, due to data truncation in the z direction (i.e. along the scanner axis). Given the desire to increase the fraction of the voxels which may be reconstructed from a given scan there is a desire to incorporate some extrapolated data into the image reconstruction procedure. In this work one approach is described which consists of a two-pass procedure where the first pass image reconstruction is performed over a larger extent in the z direction, a non-linear transform is applied to the initial reconstruction and a forward projection is applied in order to estimate the extrapolated image data. Initial results are presented which compare the method to zeroth order extrapolation and demonstrate that improvement in the reconstruction of the corner regions with a simple numerical phantom and with anatomical phantom data from a prototype wide coverage CT system.