Fast and stable cone-beam filtered backprojection method for non-planar orbits

Abstract

We propose a new cone-beam shift-variant filtered backprojection (FBP) method for non-planar orbit data acquisitions. The new method is exact, fast and stable to discretization errors. It is based on the hybrid FBP framework whose key feature is to combine the shift-variant filtering with the ramp filtering to produce the filtered projections. We show that an adequate combination of the two filterings allows us to minimize contributions of the time-consuming and numerically unstable shift-variant filtering. We demonstrate the performances of the new method by simulation studies. We also apply the new method to real x-ray data acquired from our experimental system of monochromatic computed tomography.