Mud-Net: multi-domain deep unrolling network for simultaneous sparse-view and metal artifact reduction in computed tomography

Abstract

Sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) is regarded as a promising technique to accelerate data acquisition and reduce radiation dose. However, in the presence of metallic implants, SVCT inevitably makes the reconstructed CT images suffer from severe metal artifacts and streaking artifacts due to the lack of sufficient projection data. Previous stand-alone SVCT and metal artifact reduction (MAR) methods to solve the problem of simultaneously sparse-view and metal artifact reduction (SVMAR) are plagued by insufficient correction accuracy. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multi-domain deep unrolling network, called Mud-Net, for SVMAR. Specifically, we establish a joint sinogram, image, artifact, and coding domains deep unrolling reconstruction model to recover high-quality CT images from the under-sampled sinograms corrupted by metallic implants. To train this multi-domain network effectively, we embed multi-domain knowledge into the network training process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method is superior to both existing MAR methods in the full-view MAR task and previous SVCT methods in the SVMAR task.