Program Information

Low-Dose X-Ray CT Reconstruction Using a Hybrid First-Order Method

M Jin

L Liu¹ , W Lin¹ , M Jin²*, (1) Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, (2) University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX

Presentations

SU-F-18C-13 Sunday 4:00PM - 6:00PM Room: 18C

Purpose:To develop a novel reconstruction method for X-ray CT that can lead to accurate reconstruction at significantly reduced dose levels combining low X-ray incident intensity and few views of projection data.

Methods:The noise nature of the projection data at low X-ray incident intensity was modeled and accounted by the weighted least-squares (WLS) criterion. The total variation (TV) penalty was used to mitigate artifacts caused by few views of data. The first order primal-dual (FOPD) algorithm was used to minimize TV in image domain, which avoided the difficulty of the non-smooth objective function. The TV penalized WLS reconstruction was achieved by alternated FOPD TV minimization and projection onto convex sets (POCS) for data fidelity constraints. The proposed FOPD-POCS method was evaluated using the FORBILD jaw phantom and the real cadaver head CT data.

Results:The quantitative measures, root mean square error (RMSE) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), demonstrate the superior denoising capability of WLS over LS-based TV iterative reconstruction. The improvement of RMSE (WLS vs. LS) is 15%~21% and that of CNR is 17%~72% when the incident counts per ray are ranged from 1x10⁵ to 1x10³. In addition, the TV regularization can accurately reconstruct images from about 50 views of the jaw phantom. The FOPD-POCS reconstruction reveals more structural details and suffers fewer artifacts in both the phantom and real head images. The FOPD-POCS method also shows fast convergence at low X-ray incident intensity.

Conclusion:The new hybrid FOPD-POCS method, based on TV penalized WLS, yields excellent image quality when the incident X-ray intensity is low and the projection views are limited. The reconstruction is computationally efficient since the FOPD minimization of TV is applied only in the image domain. The characteristics of FOPD-POCS can be exploited to significantly reduce radiation dose of X-ray CT without compromising accuracy for diagnosis or treatment planning.



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