Intra-Guided Dual-Energy Material Decomposition Method for Dual-Source CBCT Systems

Dual-energy CBCT imaging plays a crucial role in advanced imaging applications due to its ability to quantify material components. Although there are multiple established systems for dual-energy imaging, they often come with high deployment costs. This study investigates the feasibility of dual-energy material decomposition on a less expensive dual-source CBCT system. Due to the specific geometry of dual-source CBCT, cone-beam (CB) artifacts seriously degrade the material decomposition quality when the direct inversion method is adopted. In this paper, a novel dual-source intra-guided material decomposition framework is proposed to suppress CB artifacts in the material maps. Firstly, a dual-source two-pass algorithm is developed for artifact pre-correction during image reconstruction. Then, the structure of small cone-angle regions from one X-ray source is utilized to guide cone beam artifact removal in large cone-angle regions from another source. Finally, direct matrix inverse material decomposition is applied to the filtered image. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the authentic human phantom and demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves excellent performance in cone beam artifact reduction compared to other methods, and significantly enhances the quality of the material maps.