Sparse-view CT reconstruction based on gradient directional total variation

Abstract

The sparse-view problem of image reconstruction encountered in computed tomography (CT) is an important research issue due to its considerable potential in decreasing radiation dose and improving detection efficiency. Among the current sparse-view CT reconstruction algorithms, iterative reconstruction algorithms that consider total variation (TV) regularization exhibit good performance. However, the gradient difference direction is singular or fixed in conventional TV algorithms, leading to undesired artefacts when minimizing TV in sparse-view CT. To effectively address this issue, based on TV minimization, the gradient difference directional information is introduced as additional prior information in the regularization term, and a new gradient-based directional total variation minimization algorithm is proposed, which adaptively chooses mutative gradient directions to calculate the directional difference operators, and calculates the sum of the direction difference operators. In addition, to solve the fault tolerance and computational load, considering redundant blocks of reconstructed image, we can estimate the gradient directional information of each subblock via the gradient approximation method. For simplicity, the proposed algorithm is termed the BDTV algorithm. To demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm, the simulation data and actual CT data from different algorithms are compared, and the results indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective at preserving details that are lost in the TV minimization, artefact reduction and noise suppression in sparse-view CT.