ADAPTIVE DENSITY CORRECTION IN COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHIC IMAGES

An adaptive density correction (ADC) method and system automatically compensate for pseudo-enhancement (PEH) of voxels in computed tomography (CT) data, such as in fecal-tagged CT colonography (ftCTC), so air (or another low-contrast background) and soft tissues are represented by their usual CT attenuations. ADC estimates an amount of pseudo-enhancement energy that was received by voxels that are near tagged voxels (i.e., voxels that are tagged with a high-contrast agent), based on a first distribution scheme, such as a Gaussian distribution. ADC then iteratively distributes PEH energy received by voxels to neighboring voxels, according to another distribution scheme, which may be another Gaussian function. ADC then subtracts the total amount of PEH energy at each voxel from the CT data of the voxel.