Dual-Source CBCT for Large FoV Imaging Under Short-Scan Trajectories

Cone-beam CT is extensively used in medical diagnosis and treatment. Despite its large longitudinal field of view (FoV), the horizontal FoV of CBCT systems is severely limited due to the detector width. Certain commercial CBCT systems increase the horizontal FoV by employing the offset detector method. However, this method necessitates 360° full circular scanning trajectory which increases the scanning time and is not compatible with specific CBCT system models. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of large FoV imaging under short scan trajectories with an additional X-ray source. A dual-source CBCT geometry is proposed as well as two corresponding image reconstruction algorithms. The first one is based on cone-parallel rebinning and the subsequent employs a modified Parker weighting scheme. Theoretical calculations demonstrate that the proposed geometry achieves a wider horizontal FoV than the ${90}\%$ detector offset geometry (radius of ${214}.{83}\textit {mm}$ vs. ${198}.{99}\textit {mm}$ ) with a significantly reduced rotation angle (less than 230° vs. 360°). As demonstrated by experiments, the proposed geometry and reconstruction algorithms obtain comparable imaging qualities within the FoV to conventional CBCT imaging techniques. Implementing the proposed geometry is straightforward and does not substantially increase development expenses. It possesses the capacity to expand CBCT applications even further.