Virtual clinical trial in action: textured XCAT phantoms and scanner-specific CT simulator to characterize noise across CT reconstruction algorithms

Author(s):  
Ehsan Abadi ◽  
Wiliam P. Segars ◽  
Brian Harrawood ◽  
Anuj J. Kapadia ◽  
Ehsan Samei
2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 829-847
Author(s):  
Hua Huang ◽  
Chengwu Lu ◽  
Lingli Zhang ◽  
Weiwei Wang

AbstractThe projection data obtained using the computed tomography (CT) technique are often incomplete and inconsistent owing to the radiation exposure and practical environment of the CT process, which may lead to a few-view reconstruction problem. Reconstructing an object from few projection views is often an ill-posed inverse problem. To solve such problems, regularization is an effective technique, in which the ill-posed problem is approximated considering a family of neighboring well-posed problems. In this study, we considered the {\ell_{1/2}} regularization to solve such ill-posed problems. Subsequently, the half thresholding algorithm was employed to solve the {\ell_{1/2}} regularization-based problem. The convergence analysis of the proposed method was performed, and the error bound between the reference image and reconstructed image was clarified. Finally, the stability of the proposed method was analyzed. The result of numerical experiments demonstrated that the proposed method can outperform the classical reconstruction algorithms in terms of noise suppression and preserving the details of the reconstructed image.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhifang Wu ◽  
Binwei Guo ◽  
Bin Huang ◽  
Xinzhong Hao ◽  
Ping Wu ◽  
...  

AbstractTo evaluate the quantification accuracy of different positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET/CT) reconstruction algorithms, we measured the recovery coefficient (RC) and contrast recovery (CR) in phantom studies. The results played a guiding role in the partial-volume-effect correction (PVC) for following clinical evaluations. The PET images were reconstructed with four different methods: ordered subsets expectation maximization (OSEM), OSEM with time-of-flight (TOF), OSEM with TOF and point spread function (PSF), and Bayesian penalized likelihood (BPL, known as Q.Clear in the PET/CT of GE Healthcare). In clinical studies, SUVmax and SUVmean (the maximum and mean of the standardized uptake values, SUVs) of 75 small pulmonary nodules (sub-centimeter group: < 10 mm and medium-size group: 10–25 mm) were measured from 26 patients. Results show that Q.Clear produced higher RC and CR values, which can improve quantification accuracy compared with other methods (P < 0.05), except for the RC of 37 mm sphere (P > 0.05). The SUVs of sub-centimeter fludeoxyglucose (FDG)-avid pulmonary nodules with Q.Clear illustrated highly significant differences from those reconstructed with other algorithms (P < 0.001). After performing the PVC, highly significant differences (P < 0.001) still existed in the SUVmean measured by Q.Clear comparing with those measured by the other algorithms. Our results suggest that the Q.Clear reconstruction algorithm improved the quantification accuracy towards the true uptake, which potentially promotes the diagnostic confidence and treatment response evaluations with PET/CT imaging, especially for the sub-centimeter pulmonary nodules. For small lesions, PVC is essential.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (6Part2) ◽  
pp. 92-92
Author(s):  
S Thengumpallil ◽  
J-F Germond ◽  
O Matzinger ◽  
J Bourhis ◽  
F Bochud ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Yu-Jung Tsai ◽  
Alexandre Bousse ◽  
Simon Arridge ◽  
Charles W. Stearns ◽  
Brian F. Hutton ◽  
...  

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (18) ◽  
pp. 3941 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li ◽  
Cai ◽  
Wang ◽  
Zhang ◽  
Tang ◽  
...  

Limited-angle computed tomography (CT) image reconstruction is a challenging problem in the field of CT imaging. In some special applications, limited by the geometric space and mechanical structure of the imaging system, projections can only be collected with a scanning range of less than 90°. We call this kind of serious limited-angle problem the ultra-limited-angle problem, which is difficult to effectively alleviate by traditional iterative reconstruction algorithms. With the development of deep learning, the generative adversarial network (GAN) performs well in image inpainting tasks and can add effective image information to restore missing parts of an image. In this study, given the characteristic of GAN to generate missing information, the sinogram-inpainting-GAN (SI-GAN) is proposed to restore missing sinogram data to suppress the singularity of the truncated sinogram for ultra-limited-angle reconstruction. We propose the U-Net generator and patch-design discriminator in SI-GAN to make the network suitable for standard medical CT images. Furthermore, we propose a joint projection domain and image domain loss function, in which the weighted image domain loss can be added by the back-projection operation. Then, by inputting a paired limited-angle/180° sinogram into the network for training, we can obtain the trained model, which has extracted the continuity feature of sinogram data. Finally, the classic CT reconstruction method is used to reconstruct the images after obtaining the estimated sinograms. The simulation studies and actual data experiments indicate that the proposed method performed well to reduce the serious artifacts caused by ultra-limited-angle scanning.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 620-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dayu Xiao ◽  
Xiaotong Zhang ◽  
Jianhua Li ◽  
Nan Bao ◽  
Yan Kang

Computed tomography (CT) scans produce ionizing radiation in the body, and high-dose CT scans may increase the risk of cancer. Therefore, reducing the CT radiation dose is particularly important in clinical diagnosis, which is achieved mainly by reducing projection views and tube current. However, the projection data are incomplete in the case of sparse views, which may cause stripe artifacts in the image reconstructed by the filtered back projection (FBP) algorithm, thereby losing the details of the image. Low current intensity also increases the noise of the projection data, degrading the quality of the reconstructed image. This study aimed to use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to address the shearlet-based sparse regularization problem, which is subsequently referred to as ADMM-shearlet method. The low-dose projection data were simulated by adding Gaussian noise with zero mean to high-dose projection data. Then FBP, simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique, total variation, and ADMM-shearlet methods were used to reconstruct images. Normalized mean square error, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and universal quality index were used to evaluate the performance of different reconstruction algorithms. Compared with the traditional reconstruction algorithms, the ADMM-shearlet algorithm performed well in suppressing the noise due to the low dose while maintaining the image details.


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