Unsupervised Polychromatic Neural Representation for CT Metal Artifact Reduction

Emerging neural reconstruction techniques based on tomography (e.g., NeRF, NeAT, and NeRP) have started showing unique capabilities in medical imaging. In this work, we present a novel Polychromatic neural representation (Polyner) to tackle the challenging problem of CT imaging when metallic implants exist within the human body. CT metal artifacts arise from the drastic variation of metal's attenuation coefficients at various energy levels of the X-ray spectrum, leading to a nonlinear metal effect in CT measurements. Recovering CT images from metal-affected measurements hence poses a complicated nonlinear inverse problem where empirical models adopted in previous metal artifact reduction (MAR) approaches lead to signal loss and strongly aliased reconstructions.