On Scale Space Radon Transform, Properties and Application in CT Image Reconstruction
This work addresses image quality issues in medical CT imaging, offering a method that could reduce radiation dose, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Filtered Backprojection techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of artifacts and noise in CT image reconstruction by proposing a Scale Space Radon Transform (SSRT) model to better reflect physical CT system dimensions, resulting in improved image quality with higher PSNR and SSIM scores, especially with reduced projections and noise.
Since the Radon transform (RT) consists in a line integral function, some modeling assumptions are made on Computed Tomography (CT) system, making image reconstruction analytical methods, such as Filtered Backprojection (FBP), sensitive to artifacts and noise. In the other hand, recently, a new integral transform, called Scale Space Radon Transform (SSRT), is introduced where, RT is a particular case. Thanks to its interesting properties, such as good scale space behavior, the SSRT has known number of new applications. In this paper, with the aim to improve the reconstructed image quality for these methods, we propose to model the X-ray beam with the Scale Space Radon Transform (SSRT) where, the assumptions done on the physical dimensions of the CT system elements reflect better the reality. After depicting the basic properties and the inversion of SSRT, the FBP algorithm is used to reconstruct the image from the SSRT sinogram where the RT spectrum used in FBP is replaced by SSRT and the Gaussian kernel, expressed in their frequency domain. PSNR and SSIM, as quality measures, are used to compare RT and SSRT-based image reconstruction on Shepp-Logan head and anthropomorphic abdominal phantoms. The first findings show that the SSRT-based method outperforms the methods based on RT, especially, when the number of projections is reduced, making it more appropriate for applications requiring low-dose radiation, such as medical X-ray CT. While SSRT-FBP and RT-FBP have utmost the same runtime, the experiments show that SSRT-FBP is more robust to Poisson-Gaussian noise corrupting CT data.