Half-scan artifact correction using generative adversarial network for dental CT

Half-scan image reconstruction with Parker weighting can correct motion artifacts in dental CT images taken with a slow scan-based dental CT. Since the residual half-scan artifacts in the dental CT images appear much stronger than those in medical CT images, the artifacts often persist to the extent that they compromise the surface-rendered bone and tooth images computed from the dental CT images. We used a variation of generative adversarial network (GAN), so-called U-WGAN, to correct half-scan artifacts in dental CT images. For the generative network of GAN, we used a U-net structure of five stages to take advantage of its high computational efficiency. We trained the network using the Wasserstein loss function on the dental CT images of 40 patients. We tested the network with comparing its output images to the half-scan images corrected with other methods; Parker weighting and the other two popular GANs, that is, SRGAN and m-WGAN. For the quantitative comparison, we used the image quality metrics measuring the similarity of the corrected images to the full-scan images (reference images) and the noise level on the corrected images. We also compared the visual quality of the surface-rendered bone and tooth images. We observed that the proposed network outperformed Parker weighting and other GANs in all the image quality metrics. The computation time for the proposed network to process 336×336×336 3D images on a GPU-equipped personal computer was about 3 s, which was much shorter than those of SRGAN and m-WGAN, 50 s and 54 s, respectively.