Real phantom datasets for the evaluation of reconstruction algorithms at various dose conditions

To reduce the radiation dose delivered to patients, a number of novel computed tomography (CT) reconstruction algorithms have been proposed to recover images from the sparsely sampled datasets or the datasets from low dose exposure. However, the performance of these algorithms has not been quantitatively evaluated with realistic CT datasets in an easily reproducible fashion. Here, we present four CT phantom datasets acquired from our bench-top micro-CT system. Such datasets can be used to provide the baseline for comparison among various CT reconstruction algorithms, in terms of noise level, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), uniformity, spatial resolution and CT number accuracy.