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Metal artefacts in CT images may disrupt image quality and interfere with diagnosis. Recently many deep-learning-based CT metal artefact reduction (MAR) methods have been proposed. Current deep MAR methods may be troubled with domain gap problem, where methods trained on simulated data cannot perform well on practical data. In this work, we experimentally investigate two image-domain supervised methods, two dual-domain supervised methods and two image-domain unsupervised methods on a dental dataset and a torso dataset, to explore whether domain gap problem exists or is overcome. We find that I-DL-MAR and DudoNet are effective for practical data of the torso dataset, indicating the domain gap problem is solved. However, none of the investigated methods perform satisfactorily on practical data of the dental dataset. Based on the experimental results, we further analyze the causes of domain gap problem for each method and dataset, which may be beneficial for improving existing methods or designing new ones. The findings suggest that the domain gap problem in deep MAR methods remains to be addressed.

Low dose CT is of great interest in these days. Dose reduction raises noise level in projections and decrease image quality in reconstructions. Model based image reconstruction can combine statistical noise model together with prior knowledge into an Bayesian optimization problem so that significantly reduce noise and artefacts. In this work, we propose a model-base deep learning for CT reconstruction so that a reconstruction network can be trained with no ground-truth images needed. Instead of minimizing cost function for each image, the network learns to minimize an ensemble cost function for the whole training set. No iteration will be needed for real data reconstruction using such a trained network. We experimented with a penalized weighted least-squares (PWLS) cost function for low dose CT reconstruction and tested on data from a practical dental CT. Very encouraging results with great noise reductions are obtained., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, conference

X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) imaging has been widely used in clinical diagnosis, non-destructive examination, and public safety inspection. Sparse-view (sparse view) CT has great potential in radiation dose reduction and scan acceleration. However, sparse view CT data is insufficient and traditional reconstruction results in severe streaking artifacts. In this work, based on deep learning, we compared image reconstruction performance for sparse view CT reconstruction with projection domain network, image domain network, and comprehensive network combining projection and image domains. Our study is executed with numerical simulated projection of CT images from real scans. Results demonstrated deep learning networks can effectively reconstruct rich high frequency structural information without streaking artefact commonly seen in sparse view CT. A comprehensive network combining deep learning in both projection domain and image domain can get best results.