Completion of Metal-Damaged Traces Based on Deep Learning in Sinogram Domain for Metal Artifacts Reduction in CT Images

In computed tomography (CT) images, the presence of metal artifacts leads to contaminated object structures. Theoretically, eliminating metal artifacts in the sinogram domain can correct projection deviation and provide reconstructed images that are more real. Contemporary methods that use deep networks for completing metal-damaged sinogram data are limited to discontinuity at the boundaries of traces, which, however, lead to secondary artifacts. This study modifies the traditional U-net and adds two sinogram feature losses of projection images—namely, continuity and consistency of projection data at each angle, improving the accuracy of the complemented sinogram data. Masking the metal traces also ensures the stability and reliability of the unaffected data during metal artifacts reduction. The projection and reconstruction results and various evaluation metrics reveal that the proposed method can accurately repair missing data and reduce metal artifacts in reconstructed CT images.