A new method to determine the projected coordinate origin of a cone-beam CT system using elliptical projection

In order to determine the projected coordinate origin in the cone-beam CT scanning system with respect to the Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) algorithm, we propose a simple yet feasible method to accurately measure the projected coordinate origin. This method was established on the basis of the theory that the projection of a spherical object in the cone-beam field is an ellipse. We first utilized image processing and the least square estimation method to get each major axis of the elliptical Digital Radiography (DR) projections of a group of spherical objects. Then we determined the intersection point of the group of major axis by solving an over-determined equation set that was composed by the major axis equations of all the elliptical projections. Based on the experimental results, this new method was proved to be easy to implement in practical scanning systems with high accuracy and anti-noise capability.