Metal Artifacts in Attenuation and Phase Contrast X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography: A Comparative Study

Abstract Background Metal artifacts arising around high-density components are a widely known problem in X-ray computed tomography (XCT) for both medical and industrial applications. Although phase contrast imaging XCT (PCI-XCT) is to be less prone metal caused by beam hardening, so far only little effort was made its comparison other, more established methods. Objective In the course of this work, absence literature addressed quantitative PCI-XCT attenuation (AC-XCT). Methods A polymer specimen including four Ti6Al4V inserts investigated PCI- AC-XCT with different pre-filter settings artifact reduction (MAR) algorithm. Artifacts image quality were evaluated streak index which provides metric assessment contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). Results showed that significantly reduced matched combination hardware pre-filtering post-processing MAR However, leads worse CNR close surface could not removed sufficiently Conclusions This work demonstrates potential presents first