Cone-beam mammo-computed tomography from data along two tilting arcs

Over the past several years there has been an increasing interest in cone-beam computed tomography (CT) for breast imaging. In this article, we propose a new scheme for theoretically exact cone-beam mammo-CT and develop a corresponding Katsevich-type reconstruction algorithm. In our scheme, cone-beam scans are performed along two tilting arcs to collect a sufficient amount of information for exact reconstruction. In our algorithm, cone-beam data are filtered in a shift-invariant fashion and then weighted backprojected into the three-dimensional space for the final reconstruction. Our approach has several desirable features, including tolerance of axial data truncation, efficiency in sequential/parallel implementation, and accuracy for quantitative analysis. We also demonstrate the system performance and clinical utility of the proposed technique in numerical simulations. (c) 2006 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.