No Arabic abstract
We consider reconstructing multi-channel images from measurements performed by photon-counting and energy-discriminating detectors in the setting of multi-spectral X-ray computed tomography (CT). Our aim is to exploit the strong structural correlation that is known to exist between the channels of multi-spectral CT images. To that end, we adopt the multi-channel Potts prior to jointly reconstruct all channels. This prior produces piecewise constant solutions with strongly correlated channels. In particular, edges are enforced to have the same spatial position across channels which is a benefit over TV-based methods. We consider the Potts prior in two frameworks: (a) in the context of a variational Potts model, and (b) in a Potts-superiorization approach that perturbs the iterates of a basic iterative least squares solver. We identify an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) approach as well as a Potts-superiorized conjugate gradient method as particularly suitable. In numerical experiments, we compare the Potts prior based approaches to existing TV-type approaches on realistically simulated multi-spectral CT data and obtain improved reconstruction for compound solid bodies.
The construction of three-dimensional multi-modal tissue maps provides an opportunity to spur interdisciplinary innovations across temporal and spatial scales through information integration. While the preponderance of effort is allocated to the cellular level and explore the changes in cell interactions and organizations, contextualizing findings within organs and systems is essential to visualize and interpret higher resolution linkage across scales. There is a substantial normal variation of kidney morphometry and appearance across body size, sex, and imaging protocols in abdominal computed tomography (CT). A volumetric atlas framework is needed to integrate and visualize the variability across scales. However, there is no abdominal and retroperitoneal organs atlas framework for multi-contrast CT. Hence, we proposed a high-resolution CT retroperitoneal atlas specifically optimized for the kidney across non-contrast CT and early arterial, late arterial, venous and delayed contrast enhanced CT. Briefly, we introduce a deep learning-based volume of interest extraction method and an automated two-stage hierarchal registration pipeline to register abdominal volumes to a high-resolution CT atlas template. To generate and evaluate the atlas, multi-contrast modality CT scans of 500 subjects (without reported history of renal disease, age: 15-50 years, 250 males & 250 females) were processed. We demonstrate a stable generalizability of the atlas template for integrating the normal kidney variation from small to large, across contrast modalities and populations with great variability of demographics. The linkage of atlas and demographics provided a better understanding of the variation of kidney anatomy across populations.
Algebraic models for the reconstruction problem in X-ray computed tomography (CT) provide a flexible framework that applies to many measurement geometries. For large-scale problems we need to use iterative solvers, and we need stopping rules for these methods that terminate the iterations when we have computed a satisfactory reconstruction that balances the reconstruction error and the influence of noise from the measurements. Many such stopping rules are developed in the inverse problems communities, but they have not attained much attention in the CT world. The goal of this paper is to describe and illustrate four stopping rules that are relevant for CT reconstructions.
As one of the most commonly ordered imaging tests, computed tomography (CT) scan comes with inevitable radiation exposure that increases the cancer risk to patients. However, CT image quality is directly related to radiation dose, thus it is desirable to obtain high-quality CT images with as little dose as possible. CT image denoising tries to obtain high dose like high-quality CT images (domain X) from low dose low-quality CTimages (domain Y), which can be treated as an image-to-image translation task where the goal is to learn the transform between a source domain X (noisy images) and a target domain Y (clean images). In this paper, we propose a multi-cycle-consistent adversarial network (MCCAN) that builds intermediate domains and enforces both local and global cycle-consistency for edge denoising of CT images. The global cycle-consistency couples all generators together to model the whole denoising process, while the local cycle-consistency imposes effective supervision on the process between adjacent domains. Experiments show that both local and global cycle-consistency are important for the success of MCCAN, which outperformsCCADN in terms of denoising quality with slightly less computation resource consumption.
Three dimensional surface reconstruction based on two dimensional sparse information in the form of only a small number of level lines of the surface with moderately complex structures, containing both structured and unstructured geometries, is considered in this paper. A new model has been proposed which is based on the idea of using normal vector matching combined with a first order and a second order total variation regularizers. A fast algorithm based on the augmented Lagrangian is also proposed. Numerical experiments are provided showing the effectiveness of the model and the algorithm in reconstructing surfaces with detailed features and complex structures for both synthetic and real world digital maps.
Multi-image super-resolution (MISR) usually outperforms single-image super-resolution (SISR) under a proper inter-image alignment by explicitly exploiting the inter-image correlation. However, the large computational demand encumbers the deployment of MISR methods in practice. In this work, we propose a distributed optimization framework based on data parallelism for fast large-scale MISR which supports multi- GPU acceleration, named FL-MISR. Inter-GPU communication for the exchange of local variables and over-lapped regions is enabled to impose a consensus convergence of the distributed task allocated to each GPU node. We have seamlessly integrated FL-MISR into the computed tomography (CT) imaging system by super-resolving multiple projections of the same view acquired by subpixel detector shift. The SR reconstruction is performed on the fly during the CT acquisition such that no additional computation time is introduced. We evaluated FL-MISR quantitatively and qualitatively on multiple objects including aluminium cylindrical phantoms, QRM bar pattern phantoms, and concrete joints. Experiments show that FL-MISR can effectively improve the spatial resolution of CT systems in modulation transfer function (MTF) and visual perception. Besides, comparing to a multi-core CPU implementation, FL-MISR achieves a more than 50x speedup on an off-the-shelf 4-GPU system.