X-ray CT Metal Artifact Reduction Using Wavelet Domain Sparse Regularization

X-ray computed tomography (CT) imaging of patients with metallic implants usually suffers from streaking metal artifacts. In this paper, we propose a new projection completion metal artifact reduction (MAR) algorithm by formulating the completion of missing projections as a regularized inverse problem in the wavelet domain. The Douglas-Rachford splitting (DRS) algorithm was used to iteratively solve the problem. Two types of prior information were exploited in the algorithm: 1) the sparsity of the wavelet coefficients of CT sinograms in a dictionary of translation-invariant wavelets and 2) the detail wavelet coefficients of a prior sinogram obtained from the forward projection of a segmented CT image. A pseudoL0 synthesis prior was utilized to exploit and promote the sparsity of wavelet coefficients. The proposed L0-DRS MAR algorithm was compared with standard linear interpolation and the normalized metal artifact reduction (NMAR) approach proposed by Meyer using both simulated and clinical studies including hip prostheses, dental fillings, spine fixation and electroencephalogram electrodes in brain imaging. The [...] MEHRANIAN, Abolfazl, et al. X-ray CT metal artifact reduction using wavelet domain L0 sparse regularization. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2013, vol. 32, no. 9, p. 1707-22 DOI : 10.1109/TMI.2013.2265136