X-Ray CT Image Reconstruction via Wavelet Frame Based Regularization and Radon Domain Inpainting

X-ray computed tomography (CT) has been playing an important role in diagnostic of cancer and radiotherapy. However, high imaging dose added to healthy organs during CT scans is a serious clinical concern. Imaging dose in CT scans can be reduced by reducing the number of X-ray projections. In this paper, we consider 2D CT reconstructions using very small number of projections. Some regularization based reconstruction methods have already been proposed in the literature for such task, like the total variation (TV) based reconstruction [1–4] and balanced approach with wavelet frame based regularization [5]. For most of the existing methods, at least 40 projections is usually needed to get a satisfactory reconstruction. In order to keep radiation dose as minimal as possible, while increase the quality of the reconstructed images, one needs to enhance the resolution of the projected image in the Radon domain without increasing the total number of projections. The goal of this paper is to propose a CT reconstruction model with wavelet frame based regularization and Radon domain inpainting. The proposed model simultaneously reconstructs a high quality image and its corresponding high resolution measurements in Radon domain. In addition, we discovered that using the isotropic wavelet frame regularization proposed in [6] is superior than using its anisotropic counterpart. Our proposed model, as well as other models presented in this paper, is solved rather efficiently by split Bregman algorithm [7,8]. Numerical simulations and comparisons will be presented at the end.