Practical geometric calibration for helical cone-beam industrial computed tomography.

In helical cone-beam industrial computed tomography (ICT), the reconstructed images may be interfered by geometry artifacts due to the presence of mechanical misalignments. To obtain artifact-free reconstruction images, a practical geometric calibration method for helical scan is investigated based on Noo's analytic geometric calibration method for circular scan. The presented method is implemented by first dividing the whole ascending path of helical scan into several pieces, then acquiring the projections of a dedicated calibration phantom in circular scan at each section point, of which geometry parameters are calculated using Noo's analytic method. At last, the geometry parameters of each projection in a piece can be calculated by those of the two end points of the piece. We performed numerical simulations and real data experiments to study the performance of the presented method. The experimental results indicated that the method can obtain high-precision geometry parameters of helical scan and give satisfactory reconstruction images.