Preliminary study of optimization-based image reconstruction from dental cone-beam CT data

Cone-beam CT (CBCT) has gained considerable popularity in dentistry over the past decade. The increasing use of dental CBCT also raised concern about potential radiation risk. It is thus desirable to lower the radiation dose in CBCT data acquisition. However, image quality may be degraded when current analytic-based algorithms are used for reconstructing images from low-dose CBCT data. Recently, optimization-based algorithms have been investigated for image reconstruction from data containing high levels of noise. In this work, we apply an optimization-based algorithm to reconstructing images from standard- and low-dose dental CBCT data sets. The result shows that optimization-based reconstructions from standard-dose data are comparable to images clinically used, and that optimization-based reconstructions from low-dose data show improved quality over clinical ones.