A fast beam hardening correction method incorporated in a filtered back-projection based MAP algorithm

The beam hardening effect can induce strong artifacts in CT images, which result in severely deteriorated image quality with incorrect intensities (CT numbers). This paper develops an effective and efficient beam hardening correction algorithm incorporated in a filtered back-projection based maximum a posteriori (BHC-FMAP). In the proposed algorithm, the beam hardening effect is modeled and incorporated into the forward-projection of the MAP to suppress beam hardening induced artifacts, and the image update process is performed by Feldkamp-Davis-Kress method based back-projection to speed up the convergence. The proposed BHC-FMAP approach does not require information about the beam spectrum or the material properties, or any additional segmentation operation. The proposed method was qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated using both phantom and animal projection data. The experimental results demonstrate that the BHC-FMAP method can efficiently provide a good correction of beam hardening induced artefacts.