Implementations, comparisons, and an investigation of heuristic techniques for cone-beam tomography

A novel cone-beam reconstruction method was proposed in 1985. The first objective of the work reported here is to implement this reconstruction method. The second objective is to compare it with the method developed by Feldkamp et al. (1984). Although the resulting reconstruction was not perfect, the proposed method did eliminate the axial distortion associated with Feldkamp's method. A second cone-beam reconstruction method was proposed in 1987. Two major challenges arise when this method is implemented. One is to minimize the error that results from violating an assumed condition on the distribution of the cones. The second is to minimize the error that results from the convolution of a discontinuous function which is introduced to compensate for the redundancy in the data set. The third objective of the work reported here was to investigate several heuristic techniques to minimize these errors. Techniques were found that did mitigate these errors and using these techniques resulted in images that are more accurate than those resulting from the 1985 method.