Convolutional Sparse Coding for Compressed Sensing CT Reconstruction

Over the past few years, dictionary learning (DL)-based methods have been successfully used in various image reconstruction problems. However, traditional DL-based computed tomography (CT) reconstruction methods are patch-based and ignore the consistency of pixels in overlapped patches. In addition, the features learned by these methods always contain shifted versions of the same features. In recent years, convolutional sparse coding (CSC) has been developed to address these problems. In this paper, inspired by several successful applications of CSC in the field of signal processing, we explore the potential of CSC in sparse-view CT reconstruction. By directly working on the whole image, without the necessity of dividing the image into overlapped patches in DL-based methods, the proposed methods can maintain more details and avoid artifacts caused by patch aggregation. With predetermined filters, an alternating scheme is developed to optimize the objective function. Extensive experiments with simulated and real CT data were performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve better performance than several existing state-of-the-art methods.

Sparse-View CT Reconstruction via Convolutional Sparse Coding

Traditional dictionary learning based CT reconstruction methods are patch-based and the features learned with these methods often contain shifted versions of the same features. To deal with these problems, the convolutional sparse coding (CSC) has been proposed and introduced into various applications. In this paper, inspired by the successful applications of CSC in the field of signal processing, we propose a novel sparse-view CT reconstruction method based on CSC with gradient regularization on feature maps. By directly working on whole image, which need not to divide the image into overlapped patches like dictionary learning based methods, the proposed method can maintain more details and avoid the artifacts caused by patch aggregation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has better performance than several existing algorithms in both qualitative and quantitative aspects.