Efficient scheme of low-dose CT reconstruction using TV minimization with an adaptive stopping strategy and sparse dictionary learning for post-processing

Abstract

Recently, low-dose computed tomography (CT) has become highly desirable because of the growing concern for the potential risks of excessive radiation. For low-dose CT imaging, it is a significant challenge to guarantee image quality while reducing radiation dosage. Compared with classical filtered backprojection algorithms, compressed sensing-based iterative reconstruction has achieved excellent imaging performance, but its clinical application is hindered due to its computational inefficiency. To promote low-dose CT imaging, we propose a promising reconstruction scheme which combines total-variation minimization and sparse dictionary learning to enhance the reconstruction performance, and properly schedule them with an adaptive iteration stopping strategy to boost the reconstruction speed. Experiments conducted on a digital phantom and a physical phantom demonstrate a superior performance of our method over other methods in terms of image quality and computational efficiency, which validates its potential for low-dose CT imaging.

Keywords

Low-dose computed tomography (CT) / CT imaging / Total variation / Sparse dictionary learning

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

Zhejiang University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany