A fast iteration approach to undersampled cone-beam CT reconstruction

Due to large dimensional matrix multiplications, the existing iterative algorithms for cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) reconstruction often face problems of heavy computational workload and large volume of memory usage.

This study proposes and tests an iterative algorithm of 3DA-TVAL3 for fast reconstruction of CBCT images using undersampled measurement data and the reduced amount of computer memories.

In order to reduce computational workload and computer memories based on the sparsity of the CBCT measurement matrix, the proposed iterative algorithm applies elementwise scalar multiplications in the iterative computation to search for optimal solution. Through a number of tests on three different CT data sets with different number of projections, the reconstruction performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of two accelerated iterative algorithms and the conventional FDK algorithm.

The visual and quantitative evaluations using the normalized mean square error, peak signal to noise ratio and structural similarity metrics demonstrated the faster computational time and the higher image quality of using the proposed 3DA-TVAL3 algorithm than using other conventional algorithms under comparison.

The proposed 3DA-TVAL3 algorithm can perform efficient and fast computation of CBCT reconstruction using the reduced amount of computer memories.