A graphical method for determining the in-plane rotation angle in geometric calibration of circular cone-beam CT systems

It is well known that seven parameters completely describe a circular cone-beam geometry in either flat-panel X-ray computed tomography (CT) or single pinhole SPECT imaging. This paper considers the problem of determining one of the seven parameters only, the detector in-plane rotation or twist angle η. We describe a graphical procedure that can determine η independently of all other six parameters from a geometric calibration scan of point objects. Our method is exact in the ideal noise-free case and is general in that the other two out-of-plane detector rotation angles θ and φ can be nonzero. The calibration scan typically needs at least two point objects and an even number of projection views over a full 360° data acquisition. Under certain conditions, projection data truncation or a short scan acquisition of 180°+ fan angle can be accommodated without affecting the accuracy of the calibration result. The graphical method is equally applicable to rotational multipinhole SPECT geometry. In this case, the final result is averaged from the individual estimates considering each pinhole separately. We use computer simulations and a multipinhole SPECT experiment to demonstrate the accuracy and precision of the proposed method.