Non-local means resolution enhancement of lung 4D-CT data

Image resolution in 4D-CT is a crucial bottleneck that needs to be overcome for improved dose planning in radiotherapy for lung cancer. In this paper, we propose a novel patch-based algorithm to enhance the image quality of 4D-CT data. Our premise is that anatomical information missing in one phase can be recovered from complementary information embedded in other phases. We employ a patch-based mechanism to propagate information across phases for reconstruction of intermediate slices in the axial direction, where resolution is normally the lowest. Specifically, structurally-matching and spatially-nearby patches are combined for reconstruction of each patch. For greater sensitivity to anatomical nuances, we further employ a quad-tree technique to adaptively partition each slice of the image in each phase for more fine-grained refinement. Our evaluation based on a public 4D-CT lung data indicates that our algorithm gives very promising results with significantly enhanced image structures.