A theoretical approach for the reduction of X-ray radiation dose within the optimization of the tomographic scanning process

Abstract

X-ray tomography is one of the widespread methods of medical diagnostics. Modern medical tomographic setups have many advantages among them high resolution, high level of reproducibility, the simplicity of utilization, and many others. However, one of the most significant challenges of this method is a reducing of the radiation dose. We propose here an alternative scanning approach and an optimized filtered backprojection algorithm as a tool for the dose reduction by lower illumination area during the scan. Further, we demonstrate the power of this approach for dental application, where tomographic visualization is used as the main diagnostics instrument, employing a 3D model of a skull with teeth. From the results of our reconstruction, different defects in the teeth are successfully detected with an acceptable resolution. We hope that the proposed approach will be used as a fundamental idea to low the radiation dose in medical computer topology.