An Efficient Quality Enhancement Method for Low-Dose CBCT Imaging

Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is a widely used imaging technique in medical and dental applications. However, low-dose radiation CBCT images are prone to aliasing artifacts, which introduce artifacts in microstructures, degrade image quality, and as a result affect diagnostic accuracy. Existing CBCT image enhancement approaches tend to focus on noise reduction and higher resolution but they fail to address aliasing artifacts. This paper introduces a unique anti-aliasing method specifically designed for low-dose CBCT images. The proposed approach utilizes a Butterworth filter to remove aliasing artifacts in high frequencies, while speckle noise is reduced by a Non-Local Means (NLM) filter. Finally, the overall visual quality is improved by a Laplacian filter which enhances edges while steps are taken to adjust brightness and contrast. Subjective evaluations show that our approach outperforms existing methods by an average of 98.63%, effectively mitigating aliasing without compromising resolution or introducing additional noise, thereby improving the diagnostic reliability of CBCT images and addressing a critical gap in current clinical practice.