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Background Metal artifacts arising around high-density components are a widely known problem in X-ray computed tomography (XCT) for both medical and industrial applications. Although phase contrast imaging XCT (PCI-XCT) is known to be less prone to metal artifacts caused by beam hardening, so far only little effort was made for its comparison to other, more established methods. Objective In the course of this work, this absence in literature is addressed by a quantitative comparison of PCI-XCT to attenuation contrast XCT (AC-XCT). Methods A polymer specimen including four Ti6Al4V inserts was investigated by PCI- and AC-XCT with different pre-filter settings and metal artifact reduction (MAR) algorithm. Artifacts and image quality were evaluated by a streak index which provides a quantitative metric for the assessment of streak artifacts and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). Results Results showed that streak artifacts are significantly reduced in PCI-XCT and only matched by AC-XCT in combination with hardware pre-filtering of the X-ray beam and post-processing by a MAR algorithm. However, hardware pre-filtering leads to worse CNR and artifacts close to the surface of metal inserts could not be removed sufficiently by the MAR algorithm. Conclusions This work demonstrates the potential of PCI-XCT for the reduction of metal artifacts and presents the first quantitative comparison to established AC-XCT methods. |
