Improving soft-tissue contrast of cone beam CT

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Xoran Technologies has developed a dedicated, in-office, dentomaxillofacial cone-beam CT (CBCT) scanner through previous grants from the National Institute of Health. The scanner, formerly dubbed DentoCAT, has been recently FDA approved and is currently being marketed under the name i-CAT through a partnership between Xoran Technologies and Imaging Sciences International. The scanner has met with an exceptionally high market adoption, with over twenty five orders taken in the first three months of marketing. As of the time of the writing of this grant, three units have been installed, with the rest scheduled for the upcoming weeks. While the scanner produces images with high spatial resolution and is well-suited to relatively high contrast imaging tasks, its current capability for low contrast imaging is limited. The same can be said for other commercially available dedicated dentomaxillofacial cone beam CT scanners. The ultimate goal of this project is to improve the capability of cone-beam CT technology to image low-contrast features. This will allow for the i-CAT system to be used in a broader range of dentomaxillofacial diagnostic situations including the detection and localization of soft-tissue lesions like cysts, tumors, and infections. We see cone-beam artifacts as a major challenge in achieving the improved soft tissue contrast throughout the entire image volume and have for that reason chosen to focus on eliminating these artifacts in Phase I of this effort.