Apparatus and method for joint-edge-preserving regularization to reduce noise in four-dimensional computed tomography images

摘要

A method and apparatus is provided to denoise computed tomography (CT) sinograms and reconstructed images by minimizing a penalized-weighted-least-squares objective function that includes a joint-edge-preserving regularization term. Common information shared among a series of related image and/or sinograms can beneficially be used to more accurately identify edges common to all of the image and/or sinograms. Thus, a joint edge preserving regularizer that relies on information from a series of three-dimensional constituents of a four-dimensional image, such as a time series of images in a CT profusion study or an energy series of images in spectral CT, can improve image quality by better preserving edges while simultaneously denoising the constituent images.