Super-sparsely view-sampled cone-beam CT by incorporating prior data

Computed tomography (CT) is widely used in medicine for diagnostics or for image-guided therapies, and is also popular in industrial applications for nondestructive testing. CT conventionally requires a large number of projections to produce volumetric images of a scanned object, because the conventional image reconstruction algorithm is based on filtered-backprojection. This requirement may result in relatively high radiation dose to the patients in medical CT unless the radiation dose at each view angle is reduced, and can cause expensive scanning time and efforts in industrial CT applications. Sparse- view CT may provide a viable option to address both issues including high radiation dose and expensive scanning efforts. However, image reconstruction from sparsely sampled data in CT is in general very challenging, and much efforts have been made to develop algorithms for such an image reconstruction problem. Image total-variation minimization algorithm inspired by compressive sensing theory has recently been developed, which exploits the sparseness of the image derivative magnitude and can reconstruct images from sparse-view data to a similar quality of the images conventionally reconstructed from many views. In successive CT scans, prior CT image of an object and its projection data may be readily available, and the current CT image may have not much difference from the prior image. Considering the sparseness of such a difference image between the successive scans, image reconstruction of the difference image may be achieved from very sparsely sampled data. In this work, we showed that one can further reduce the number of projections, resulting in a super-sparse scan, for a good quality image reconstruction with the aid of a prior data. Both numerical and experimental results are provided.