NEAT-Net: An Unsupervised Cross-View Prior Inpainting Network for CBCT Metal Artifact Reduction

Intraoperative Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) facilitates intraoperative navigation for Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery (MISS). However, high-attenuation metal implants used in MISS often cause metal artifacts in the reconstructed CBCT images. Current algorithms do not consider the cross-view information in the projection-domain for metal artifact reduction (MAR). Inaccurate projection-domain inpainting results in CBCT MAR lead to tissue blurring and secondary artifacts, significantly compromising the accuracy of CBCT-guided MISS and increasing surgical risks. To address the above challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised cross-view prior inpainting network for CBCT Metal Artifact Reduction named NEAT-Net. Firstly, a cross-view prior multi-scale inpainting module is constructed to learn the inter-view complementary information. Secondly, a hybrid feature attention module is proposed to adaptively fuse cross-view features. In addition, an unsupervised training approach is proposed to directly learn from metal-affected data. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm on a real clinical dataset.