A Novel Iterative CT Reconstruction Approach Based on FBP Algorithm

The Filtered Back-Projection (FBP) algorithm and its modified versions are the most important techniques for CT (Computerized tomography) reconstruction, however, it may produce aliasing degradation in the reconstructed images due to projection discretization. The general iterative reconstruction (IR) algorithms suffer from their heavy calculation burden and other drawbacks. In this paper, an iterative FBP approach is proposed to reduce the aliasing degradation. In the approach, the image reconstructed by FBP algorithm is treated as the intermediate image and projected along the original projection directions to produce the reprojection data. The difference between the original and reprojection data is filtered by a special digital filter, and then is reconstructed by FBP to produce a correction term. The correction term is added to the intermediate image to update it. This procedure can be performed iteratively to improve the reconstruction performance gradually until certain stopping criterion is satisfied. Some simulations and tests on real data show the proposed approach is better than FBP algorithm or some IR algorithms in term of some general image criteria. The calculation burden is several times that of FBP, which is much less than that of general IR algorithms and acceptable in the most situations. Therefore, the proposed algorithm has the potential applications in practical CT systems.