Adaptive-weighted Total Variation Minimization for Sparse Data toward Low-dose X-ray Computed Tomography Image Reconstruction

摘要

Previous studies have shown that by minimizing the total variation (TV) of the to-be-estimated image with some data and other constraints, a piecewise-smooth X-ray computed tomography (CT) can be reconstructed from sparse-view projection data without introducing noticeable artifacts. However, due to the piecewise constant assumption for the image, a conventional TV minimization often suffers from over-smoothness on the edges of the resulting image. To mitigate this drawback, we present an adaptive-weighted TV (AwTV) minimization in this paper. The presented AwTV model is derived by considering the anisotropic edge property among neighboring image voxels, where the associated weights are expressed as an exponential function and can be adaptively adjusted by the local image-intensity gradient for the purpose of preserving the edge details. Inspired by the previously-reported TV-POCS (projection onto convex sets) implementation, a similar AwTV-POCS implementation was developed to minimize the AwTV subject to data and other constraints for the purpose of sparse-view low-dose CT image reconstruction. To evaluate the presented AwTV-POCS , both qualitative and quantitative studies were performed by computer simulations and phantom experiments. The results show that the presented AwTV-POCS can yield images with several noticeable gains, in terms of noise-resolution tradeoff plots and full width at half maximum values, as compared to the corresponding conventional TV-POCS .