Ring artifact correction using detector line-ratios in computed tomography

Ring artifacts in computed tomography (CT) images degrade image quality and obscure the true shapes of objects. While several correction methods have been developed, their performances are often task-dependent and not generally applicable. Here, we propose a novel method to reduce ring artifacts by calculating the ratio of adjacent detector elements in the projection data, termed the line-ratio. Our method estimates the sensitivity of each detector element and equalizes them in sinogram space. As a result, the stripe pattern can be effectively removed from sinogram data, thereby also removing ring artifacts from the reconstructed CT image. Numerical simulations were performed to evaluate and compare the performance of our method with that of conventional methods. We also tested our method experimentally and demonstrated that our method has superior performance to other methods.