Cone beam artifacts arise in circular CT reconstruction. The cone beam artifacts are substantially removed by reconstructing a reference image from measured data at circular source trajectory, generating synthetic data by forward projection of the reference image along a pre-determined source trajectory, which supplements the circular source trajectory to a theoretically complete trajectory, reconstructing a correction image from the synthetic data and applying a scaling factor whose value is adaptively determined and optimized based upon the minimization of a predetermined cone beam artifact metric. Ultimately, the cone beam artifact is substantially reduced by generating a corrected image using the reference image and the correction image that has been optimally scaled based upon the adaptively determined scaling factor value.
