Regularized CT reconstruction on unstructured grid

Abstract

Computed tomography (CT) is an ill-posed problem. Reconstruction on unstructured grid reduces the computational cost and alleviates the ill-posedness by decreasing the dimension of the solution space. However, there was no systematic study on edge-preserving regularization methods for CT reconstruction on unstructured grid. In this work, we propose a novel regularization method for CT reconstruction on unstructured grid, such as triangular or tetrahedral meshes generated from the initial images reconstructed via analysis reconstruction method (e.g., filtered back-projection). The proposed regularization method is modeled as a three-term optimization problem, containing a weighted least square fidelity term motivated by the simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (SART). The related cost function contains two non-differentiable terms, which bring difficulty to the development of the fast solver. A fixed-point proximity algorithm with SART is developed for solving the related optimization problem, and accelerating the convergence. Finally, we compare the regularized CT reconstruction method to SART with different regularization methods. Numerical experiments demonstrated that the proposed regularization method on unstructured grid is effective to suppress noise and preserve edge features.