Sinogram restoration for ultra-low-dose x-ray multi-slice helical CT by nonparametric regression

Lu Jiang; Khan Siddiqui M.D.; Bin Zhu; Yang Tao; Eliot Siegel M.D.

doi:10.1117/12.711631

19 March 2007 Sinogram restoration for ultra-low-dose x-ray multi-slice helical CT by nonparametric regression

Lu Jiang, Khan Siddiqui M.D., Bin Zhu, Yang Tao, Eliot Siegel M.D.

Proceedings Volume 6510, Medical Imaging 2007: Physics of Medical Imaging; 65105L (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.711631
Event: Medical Imaging, 2007, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

During the last decade, x-ray computed tomography (CT) has been applied to screen large asymptomatic smoking and nonsmoking populations for early lung cancer detection. Because a larger population will be involved in such screening exams, more and more attention has been paid to studying low-dose, even ultra-low-dose x-ray CT. However, reducing CT radiation exposure will increase noise level in the sinogram, thereby degrading the quality of reconstructed CT images as well as causing more streak artifacts near the apices of the lung. Thus, how to reduce the noise levels and streak artifacts in the low-dose CT images is becoming a meaningful topic. Since multi-slice helical CT has replaced conventional stop-and-shoot CT in many clinical applications, this research mainly focused on the noise reduction issue in multi-slice helical CT. The experiment data were provided by Siemens SOMATOM Sensation 16-Slice helical CT. It included both conventional CT data acquired under 120 kvp voltage and 119 mA current and ultra-low-dose CT data acquired under 120 kvp and 10 mA protocols. All other settings are the same as that of conventional CT. In this paper, a nonparametric smoothing method with thin plate smoothing splines and the roughness penalty was proposed to restore the ultra-low-dose CT raw data. Each projection frame was firstly divided into blocks, and then the 2D data in each block was fitted to a thin-plate smoothing splines' surface via minimizing a roughness-penalized least squares objective function. By doing so, the noise in each ultra-low-dose CT projection was reduced by leveraging the information contained not only within each individual projection profile, but also among nearby profiles. Finally the restored ultra-low-dose projection data were fed into standard filtered back projection (FBP) algorithm to reconstruct CT images. The rebuilt results as well as the comparison between proposed approach and traditional method were given in the results and discussions section, and showed effectiveness of proposed thin-plate based nonparametric regression method.

Citation Download Citation

Lu Jiang, Khan Siddiqui M.D., Bin Zhu, Yang Tao, and Eliot Siegel M.D. "Sinogram restoration for ultra-low-dose x-ray multi-slice helical CT by nonparametric regression", Proc. SPIE 6510, Medical Imaging 2007: Physics of Medical Imaging, 65105L (19 March 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.711631

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