Patent ID: 9683948
Date: 2017-06-20
CPC Classifications: A61B,G01N,G06T,G16H

Claim:
1. A method, comprising: acquiring projection data of an object from a plurality of pixels, wherein the projection data corresponds to different angular projection views of the object acquired during a scan operation; determining a detector coefficient for each pixel of the plurality of pixels; computing a material linearization function for each pixel of the plurality of pixels; applying a water beam hardening correction to the acquired projection data from the plurality of pixels; reconstructing the single material beam hardening corrected projection data from the plurality of pixels into a reconstructed image; performing material characterization and decomposition of an image volume of the reconstructed image to reduce a number of materials analyzed in the image volume to only water and iodine; generating a re-mapped water image volume; performing forward projection on at least the re-mapped water image volume to produce a water-based projection; generating multi-material corrected projections for each pixel based on the water-based projection and a total projection attenuated by the scanned object such that the material linearization function is based on the water-based projection and the total projection; reconstructing a multi-material corrected image from the multi-material corrected projections; and performing one or more iterations of a multi-material correction on the multi-material corrected image to reduce beam hardening artifacts.