Image reconstruction from limited angle projections

A multisource x-ray interior imaging system with limited angle scanning is investigated to study the possibility of building an ultrafast microCT for dynamic small animal imaging, and two methods are employed to perform interior reconstruction from a limited number of projections collected by the multisource interior x-ray system. The first is total variation minimization with the steepest descent search (TVM-SD) and the second is total difference minimization with soft-threshold filtering (TDM-STF). Comprehensive numerical simulations and animal studies are performed to validate the associated reconstructed methods and demonstrate the feasibility and application of the proposed system configuration. The image reconstruction results show that both of the two reconstruction methods can significantly improve the image quality and the TDM-SFT is slightly superior to the TVM-SD. Finally, quantitative image analysis shows that it is possible to 8 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. 0031-9155/11/196337+21$33.00 © 2011 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine Printed in the UK 6337