Parallelized Bayesian inversion for three-dimensional dental X-ray imaging

Diagnostic and operational tasks based on dental radiology often require three-dimensional (3-D) information that is not available in a single X-ray projection image. Comprehensive 3-D information about tissues can be obtained by computerized tomography (CT) imaging. However, in dental imaging a conventional CT scan may not be available or practical because of high radiation dose, low-resolution or the cost of the CT scanner equipment. In this paper, we consider a novel type of 3-D imaging modality for dental radiology. We consider situations in which projection images of the teeth are taken from a few sparsely distributed projection directions using the dentist's regular (digital) X-ray equipment and the 3-D X-ray attenuation function is reconstructed. A complication in these experiments is that the reconstruction of the 3-D structure based on a few projection images becomes an ill-posed inverse problem. Bayesian inversion is a well suited framework for reconstruction from such incomplete data. In Bayesian inversion, the ill-posed reconstruction problem is formulated in a well-posed probabilistic form in which a priori information is used to compensate for the incomplete information of the projection data. In this paper we propose a Bayesian method for 3-D reconstruction in dental radiology. The method is partially based on Kolehmainen et al. 2003. The prior model for dental structures consist of a weighted l1 and total variation (TV)-prior together with the positivity prior. The inverse problem is stated as finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate. To make the 3-D reconstruction computationally feasible, a parallelized version of an optimization algorithm is implemented for a Beowulf cluster computer. The method is tested with projection data from dental specimens and patient data. Tomosynthetic reconstructions are given as reference for the proposed method.