Cone-Beam CT
Cone-beam CT (CBCT) acquires a full 3D volume from 2D projections recorded by a flat-panel detector as the source and detector rotate around the object, usually in one circular orbit. Compared with helical fan-beam CT it is compact and inexpensive, but it suffers more from scatter, cone-beam artifacts away from the central plane, truncation and motion.
CBCT is standard in dental and maxillofacial imaging, image-guided radiotherapy (on-board imagers on linear accelerators), interventional C-arm systems and extremity scanners, and is the usual geometry of industrial and micro-CT.
The FDK algorithm remains the main reconstruction method, with iterative and TV-regularised solvers for sparse or noisy data. Recent work covers sparse-view CBCT with neural attenuation fields and Gaussian splatting, CBCT image enhancement and synthetic CT for adaptive radiotherapy, scatter and motion correction, and 4D-CBCT for breathing motion. Open toolkits such as TIGRE, RTK and the ASTRA Toolbox provide GPU cone-beam projectors.
Browse all 77 Cone-Beam CT papers in the searchable directory
Start here
If you are new to this topic, these are good first reads, chosen by the maintainers.
- Practical cone-beam algorithm (JOSA A, 1984)
The FDK algorithm, still the workhorse reconstruction method for circular cone-beam scans. - Cone-Beam Computed Tomography with a Flat-Panel Imager: Magnitude and Effects of X-Ray Scatter (Med Phys, 2001)
Quantifies how scatter grows with cone angle and object size in flat-panel CBCT, which explains many of its image-quality limits. - Respiratory Correlated Cone Beam CT (Med Phys, 2005)
Introduced respiratory-correlated CBCT on a linear accelerator, the basis of 4D-CBCT in radiotherapy. - NAF: Neural Attenuation Fields for Sparse-View CBCT Reconstruction (MICCAI, 2022 · code)
Neural attenuation fields for sparse-view CBCT, fitted per scan without training data, with code. - Learning 3D Gaussians for Extremely Sparse-View Cone-Beam CT Reconstruction (MICCAI, 2024 · code)
Uses 3D Gaussians to carry spatial features for extremely sparse-view CBCT, with code.
Papers
The 30 most recent of 77 papers, newest first.
Browse all 77 Cone-Beam CT papers in the searchable directory
Datasets, benchmarks and toolkits
Entries from the directory whose tasks or tags match this topic.
- SPARE 4D-CBCT (official page) · Dataset — Projection + image. Thoracic 4D cone-beam CT for breathing-motion-resolved reconstruction; the reference benchmark for dynamic CBCT.
- ToothFairy2 (official page) · Dataset — 480 dental CBCT scans with 3D tooth and jaw annotations; large-scale and useful for CBCT-domain pretraining. Image domain only — volumes are released without raw projections.
- Cone-Beam CT (CBCT) Head & Neck (official page) · Dataset — Paired planning CT and on-board CBCT — the standard setting for CBCT correction and synthetic-CT work in radiotherapy.
- FleX-ray Walnut CBCT Collection (CWI) (official page) · Dataset — Projection + image. 42 walnuts scanned on three different orbits each, so that artefact-free reference volumes can be computed from the combined views and used as supervised-learning ground truth.
- SPARE Challenge (official page) · Benchmark — Thoracic 4D cone-beam CT reconstruction from a one-minute scan. The first widely adopted benchmark for breathing-resolved dynamic CBCT; run by the Image X Institute at the University of Sydney.
- CTooth / CTooth+ (official page) · Benchmark — Fully annotated 3D dental CBCT dataset and benchmark for tooth segmentation (5,803 CBCT slices), later extended to CTooth+. A small but well-annotated CBCT benchmark in a domain where artefacts are severe.
- SynthRAD2023 Challenge (official page) · Benchmark — Synthetic CT generation from CBCT and MRI.
- Generating synthetic computed tomography for radiotherapy: SynthRAD2025 challenge report (official page) · Benchmark — Synthetic CT generation from CBCT and MRI — the 2025 edition of SynthRAD, with the accompanying report documenting the tasks, data and results.
- TIGRE · Toolkit — GPU-accelerated (CUDA) toolbox for cone-beam and parallel-beam CT; FDK, SART, SIRT, CGLS and TV variants.
- ASTRA Toolbox · Toolkit — Long-standing research toolbox with a large set of projectors and algorithms; the reference CPU/GPU baseline.
- tomosipo · Toolkit — Painless specification of 2D/3D projection geometries; wraps ASTRA and integrates with PyTorch.
- LEAP · Toolkit — LLNL's LivermorE AI Projector for Computed Tomography (LEAP); production-grade model-based iterative reconstruction for 3D transmission CT.
- RTK · Toolkit — Reconstruction Toolkit built on ITK; widely used in clinical CBCT and interventional research.
- libcbct · Toolkit — Lightweight cone-beam CT reconstruction library with FDK and iterative solvers; non-commercial licence.
- CBCT Scatter Correction Tool · Toolkit — One of the very few open tools for cone-beam CT scatter estimation and correction; distributed as a prebuilt Windows executable, with no source in the repository.
Guides
Guides that cover this topic.
Other topics
- Surveys & Reviews (24)
- Classical & Iterative Reconstruction (71)
- Sparse-View CT (157)
- Limited-Angle Tomography (46)
- Low-Dose CT Denoising (69)
- Metal Artifact Reduction (23)
- Spectral & Dual-Energy CT (19)
- Dynamic & 4D CT (24)
- Scatter Correction (11)
- Geometry Calibration & Motion Compensation (28)
- Deep Unrolling & Model-Based Learning (68)
- Self-Supervised & Untrained Methods (35)
- Diffusion & Generative Priors (68)
- Implicit Neural Representations (25)
- Gaussian Splatting (26)