Soft tissue images from portable cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) scanners can be used for diagnosis and detection of\ntumor, cancer, intracerebral hemorrhage, and so forth.Due to large field of view, X-ray scattering which is the main cause of artifacts\ndegrades image quality, such as cupping artifacts, CT number inaccuracy, and low contrast, especially on soft tissue images. In this\nwork, we propose the X-ray scatter correction method for improving soft tissue images. The X-ray scatter correction scheme to\nestimate X-ray scatter signals is based on the deconvolution technique using the maximum likelihood estimation maximization\n(MLEM) method. The scatter kernels are obtained by simulating the PMMA sheet on the Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) software.\nIn the experiment, we used the QRM phantom to quantitatively compare with fan-beam CT (FBCT) data in terms of CT number\nvalues, contrast to noise ratio, cupping artifacts, and low contrast detectability. Moreover, the PH3 angiography phantom was also\nused to mimic human soft tissues in the brain. The reconstructed images with our proposed scatter correction show significant\nimprovement on image quality.Thus the proposed scatter correction technique has high potential to detect soft tissues in the brain.
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