Improved compressed sensing-based algorithm for sparse-view CT image reconstruction.

In computed tomography (CT), there are many situations where reconstruction has to be performed with sparse-view data. In sparse-view CT imaging, strong streak artifacts may appear in conventionally reconstructed images due to limited sampling rate that compromises image quality. Compressed sensing (CS) algorithm has shown potential to accurately recover images from highly undersampled data. In the past few years, total-variation-(TV-) based compressed sensing algorithms have been proposed to suppress the streak artifact in CT image reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an efficient compressed sensing-based algorithm for CT image reconstruction from few-view data where we simultaneously minimize three parameters: the ℓ 1 norm, total variation, and a least squares measure. The main feature of our algorithm is the use of two sparsity transforms-discrete wavelet transform and discrete gradient transform. Experiments have been conducted using simulated phantoms and clinical data to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results using the proposed scheme show much smaller streaking artifacts and reconstruction errors than other conventional methods.