A professor at UW-Madison is developing new methods for reducing errors in CT scans, MRIs and other imaging techniques.
Guang-Hong Chen is a medical physics specialist at the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research with a number of patents and technologies up for licensing. His work centers on ways to enhance internal medicine by improving how doctors see inside patients.
One widely used tool is known as computerized tomography, or CT imaging. X-ray images are taken of the patient from various angles, and a computer stitches the images together to create cross-sections of the patient’s body. CT scans provide more detailed information than normal X-rays, but the reconstructed images can contain errors known as artifacts.
To avoid these errors, Chen and collaborator Jiang Hsieh created a new way to break down scanned images, separating sections that contain artifacts from others that are compromised. By recombining the sections of the image using a set of image references, they were able to reduce artifacts in the scans they tested.
The researchers say their method could lead to lower hardware costs by offsetting the expense of calibrating the system to account for potential sources of artifacts. An info sheet from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation shows researchers tested 20 images with industry-specific artifacts in developing this method for cleaning up CT images. Read the full story here.
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