Comparison of sinogram- and image-domain penalized-likelihood image reconstruction estimators

In recent years, the authors and others have been exploring the use of penalized-likelihood sinogram-domain smoothing and restoration approaches for emission and transmission tomography. The motivation for this strategy was initially pragmatic: to provide a more computationally feasible alternative to fully iterative penalized-likelihood image reconstruction involving expensive backprojections and reprojections, while still obtaining some of the benefits of the statistical modeling employed in penalized-likelihood approaches. In this work, the authors seek to compare the two approaches in greater detail.

The sinogram-domain strategy entails estimating the "ideal" line integrals needed for reconstruction of an activity or attenuation distribution from the set of noisy, potentially degraded tomographic measurements by maximizing a penalized-likelihood objective function. The objective function models the data statistics as well as any degradation that can be represented in the sinogram domain. The estimated line integrals can then be input to analytic reconstruction algorithms such as filtered backprojection (FBP). The authors compare this to fully iterative approaches maximizing similar objective functions.

The authors present mathematical analyses based on so-called equivalent optimization problems that establish that the approaches can be made precisely equivalent under certain restrictive conditions. More significantly, by use of resolution-variance tradeoff studies, the authors show that they can yield very similar performance under more relaxed, realistic conditions.

The sinogram- and image-domain approaches are equivalent under certain restrictive conditions and can perform very similarly under more relaxed conditions. The match is particularly good for fully sampled, high-resolution CT geometries. One limitation of the sinogram-domain approach relative to the image-domain approach is the difficulty of imposing additional constraints, such as image non-negativity.