A paper by Dr. Ali Uneri and coauthors investigates 3D image quality and potential for radiation dose reduction using iterative model-based image reconstruction (MBIR). His work includes a comprehensive analysis of dosimetry for standard imaging protocols on the Medtronic O-arm and uses MBIR (penalized likelihood estimation with a Huber penalty) to achieve improved soft-tissue contrast resolution and dose reduction. The MBIR methods were found to increase soft-tissue contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) by nearly 50% compared to conventional filtered backprojection without loss of spatial resolution. Using custom low-dose protocols, the performance of MBIR was even higher, showing nearly a factor of 2 increase in CNR comparead to FBP when dose was reduced by a factor of 2 from standard clinical protocols. The work demonstrates the potential of MBIR for improving image quality and reducing dose in image-guided surgery and has motivated translation of the methodology to clinical studies, now underway.

The paper was published in the Medical Physics journal – link – with presentation of the work at the SPIE Medical Imaging conference, 2018.