

So, artifact is an error or distortion in an image that is unrelated to the subject being imaged.

The term artifact is applied to any systematic discrepancy in the reconstructed image and the true attenuation coefficients of the object. It’s very important to recognize these artifacts and their nature, because false diagnosis based on corrupt images can directly and seriously influence health of the patient. An artifact could be defined as an artificial peculiarity, content or information of the image that is not present in the real object. Artifacts can diminish or degrade quality of images or sometimes make them diagnostically unusable. Some of these artifacts degrade the value of diagnostic image by overlapping the important anatomical structures, while others can mimic pathological changes.

#Artifact meaning in cardiology software
More and more often due to technical or software problems, physiological or physical causes, different types of artifacts are present in the CT diagnostic images. Keywords: artifact, computer tomography, beam hardening, under sampling, correction. We also provide the original artifacts images and statistics from the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences Kaunas Clinical Hospital obtained from image databases. We presented an overview of the most common CT artifacts and methods to fix or rectify them. It is important to recognize these artifacts according to a basic understanding of their origin, especially those mimicking pathology, as they can lead to incorrect diagnosis and cause serious after-effects on patient’s health. On another words artifact is an artificial feature appearing in an image that is not present in the original investigative object. Some of them can seriously affecting diagnostic image quality, while others may simulate or be confused with different pathology. Different kinds of artifacts can occur during a computer tomography (CT) scans due to hardware or software related problems, human physiologic phenomenon or physical restrictions.
