Unmet Need
The global market for computer tomography (CT) scanners was valued at $ 8.2 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $10.4 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 4.9% from 2019 to 2026. Evidently, 3-D volumetric CT imaging is a prevalent and profitable means of imaging the body for diagnos-tic and image-guided medical procedures. However, one of the current challenges with CT im-aging is the quality of the overall image due to image artifacts that arise from high-density metal objects, such as surgical clips, staples, and instruments, generally referred to as “metal arti-facts.” A high-density of metal objects in the field of view can severely degrade image quality and obscure visualization of nearby anatomy. Some methods for metal artifact reduction (MAR) have been proposed but they require prior information about the metal objects, which is not al-ways possible. Thus, there is a need for a new method to help reduce metal artifacts in CT scans without the need of additional information for each scan.
Technology Overview
Johns Hopkins inventors have developed a method called Metal Artifact Avoidance (MAA), which makes no assumptions of prior information of the patient of metal implants and can be used in combination with other metal artifact reduction methods. Using this method, the patient will be placed on the table as usual at the beginning of the procedure. Two scout views of the patient will be acquired as usual. Then, in order to localize the dense anatomy and metal ob-jects, the two views will be backprojected to form a coarse 3D attenuation map which is then segmented to form a coarse 3D attenuation map. A metric map is then calculated and an objec-tive function is defined to capture the overall severity of metal artifacts. Then, the 3D scan of the patient is performed with the tilted circular trajectory and the 3D image is reconstructed using well established methods. Thus, a source-detector trajectory is determined that avoids metal ar-tifacts prior to the actual 3D scan.
Stage of Development
A prototype has been developed and tested in preclinical studies.
