High-order total variation minimization for interior SPECT.

Recently, we developed an approach for solving the computed tomography (CT) interior problem based on the high-order TV (HOT) minimization, assuming that a region-of-interest (ROI) is piecewise polynomial. In this paper, we generalize this finding from the CT field to the single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) field, and prove that if an ROI is piecewise polynomial, then the ROI can be uniquely reconstructed from the SPECT projection data associated with the ROI through the HOT minimization. Also, we propose a new formulation of HOT, which has an explicit formula for any n-order piecewise polynomial function, while the original formulation has no explicit formula for n ≥ 2. Finally, we verify our theoretical results in numerical simulation, and discuss relevant issues.