A Novel Weighted Total Difference Based Image
Reconstruction Algorithm for Few-View Computed
Tomography
Wei Yu
1,3
, Li Zeng
1,2
*
1 Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Technolo g y and System of the Education Ministry of China, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, 2 College of Mathematics and
Statistics, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, 3 Engineering Research Center of Industrial Computed Tomography Nondestructive Testing of the Education Ministry
of China, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China
Abstract
In practical applications of computed tomography (CT) imaging, due to the risk of high radiation dose imposed on the
patients, it is desired that high quality CT images can be accurately reconstructed from limited projection data. While with
limited projections, the images reconstructed often suffer severe artifacts and the edges of the objects are blurred. In recent
years, the compressed sensing based reconstruction algorithm has attracted major attention for CT reconstruction from a
limited number of projections. In this paper, to eliminate the streak artifacts and preserve the edge structure information of
the object, we present a novel iterative reconstruction algorithm based on weighted total difference (WTD) minimization,
and demonstrate the superior performance of this algorithm. The WTD measure enforces both the sparsity and the
directional continuity in the gradient domain, while the conventional total difference (TD) measure simply enforces the
gradient sparsity horizontally and vertically. To solve our WTD-based few-view CT reconstruction model, we use the soft-
threshold filtering approach. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the efficiency and the feasibility of our
algorithm. For a typical slice of FORBILD head phantom, using 40 projections in the experiments, our algorithm outperforms
the TD-based algorithm with more than 60% gains in terms of the root-mean-square error (RMSE), normalized root mean
square distance (NRMSD) and normalized mean absolute distance (NMAD) measures and with more than 10% gains in terms
of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) measure. While for the experiments of noisy projections, our algorithm outperforms
the TD-based algorithm with more than 15% gains in terms of the RMSE, NRMSD and NMAD measures and with more than
4% gains in terms of the PSNR measure. The experimental results indicate that our algorithm achieves better performance in
terms of suppressing streak artifacts and preserving the edge structure information of the object.
Citation: Yu W, Zeng L (2014) A Novel Weighted Total Difference Based Image Reconstruction Algorithm for Few-View Computed Tomography. PLoS ONE 9(10):
e109345. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0109345
Editor: Christof Markus Aegerter, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Received April 21, 2014; Accepted September 9, 2014; Published October 2, 2014
Copyright: ß 2014 Yu, Zeng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. All relevant data are within the paper.
Funding: This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant (61271313) (http://www.nsfc.gov.cn), National
Instrumentation Program of China (2013YQ030629) (http://www.most.gov.cn), and Chongqing science and technology research plan project (cstc2012gg-
yyjs70016) (http://www.ctin.ac.cn/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* Email: drlizeng@cqu.edu.cn
Introduction
As an extremely valuable diagnostic tool, computed tomogra-
phy (CT) has been widely used in medical area. With this powerful
tool, many valuable internal features can be extract without
cutting the object [1,2]. However, during clinical exams, excessive
X-ray radiation exposure may increase the lifetime cancer risk
[3,4]. Thus, it has great significance to use shorter time of
radiation exposure and lower patient radiation dose to reconstruct
numerically accurate tomographic images. To reduce radiation
dose, few-view CT has been an important CT imaging modality.
In this scanning data situation, tomographic image is reconstruct-
ed from the projection data collected by sparse angular sampling
[5–9]. For few-view CT, due to the projection data obtained is not
theoretically sufficient for exact reconstruction of tomographic
images, conspicuous streak artifacts are present in reconstructed
images by conventional analytic algorithms such as filtered back-
projection [5,10–12]. In this paper, we mainly focus the iterative
reconstruction algorithm for few-view CT.
Since the development of the large computational capacities in
graphical processing unit and the ongoing efforts towards lower
doses have made in CT, iterative reconstruction has become a hot
topic for all major vendors of clinical CT systems in the past years
[13–17]. The algebraic reconstruction technique and simultaneous
algebraic reconstruction technique (SART) are two classical
reconstruction algorithms for CT image reconstruction [18,19].
Since the projection data are incomplete, using the two algorithms,
obvious artifacts and noise are present in reconstructed images.
With the development of compressed sensing theory [20–22],
compressed sensing based iterative reconstruction algorithm has
drawn much attention in the medical imaging and other
tomographic imaging modalities. By adopting the compressed
sensing based iterative reconstruction algorithm, the image can be
reconstructed from rather limited projection data [23]. In
mathematics, actually, CT image reconstruction with few-view
PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 October 2014 | Volume 9 | Issue 10 | e109345