Reconstruction of 3D regions-of-interest from data in reduced helical cone-beam scans

The sufficiency conditions are derived for exact image reconstruction of a 3D ROI from projections acquired with a reduced helical scan over an angular range considerably smaller than that required by image reconstruction in, e.g., the conventional long object problem, for which the scanned angular range is often more than 2pi. ROI reconstruction is investigated by a recently developed filtered-backprojection algorithm that can make use of data acquired with a reduced helical scan. Preliminary numerical studies demonstrate and validate the ROI reconstruction. This work may have significant practical implications because a reduced scan in CT often translates to reduced motion artifacts and reduced radiation dose delivered to the subject.