Reduction of beam hardening artifacts in cone-beam CT imaging via SMART-RECON algorithm

When an automatic exposure control is introduced in C-arm cone beam CT data acquisition, the spectral inconsistencies between acquired projection data are exacerbated. As a result, conventional water/bone correction schemes are not as effective as in conventional diagnostic x-ray CT acquisitions with a fixed tube potential. In this paper, a new method was proposed to reconstruct several images with different degrees of spectral consistency and thus different levels of beam hardening artifacts. The new method relies neither on prior knowledge of the x-ray beam spectrum nor on prior compositional information of the imaging object. Numerical simulations were used to validate the algorithm.