Unintended Consequences: Review of New Artifacts Introduced by Iterative Reconstruction CT Metal Artifact Reduction in Spine Imaging

SUMMARY: Metal hardware serves as a common artifact source in spine CT imaging in the form of beam-hardening, photon starvation, and streaking. Postprocessing metal artifact reduction techniques have been developed to decrease these artifacts, which has been proved to improve visualization of soft-tissue structures and increase diagnostic confidence. However, metal artifact reduction reconstruction introduces its own novel artifacts that can mimic pathology.