Iterative 4D cardiac micro-CT image reconstruction using an adaptive spatio-temporal sparsity prior.

Temporal-correlated image reconstruction, also known as 4D CT image reconstruction, is a big challenge in computed tomography. The reasons for incorporating the temporal domain into the reconstruction are motions of the scanned object, which would otherwise lead to motion artifacts. The standard method for 4D CT image reconstruction is extracting single motion phases and reconstructing them separately. These reconstructions can suffer from undersampling artifacts due to the low number of used projections in each phase. There are different iterative methods which try to incorporate some a priori knowledge to compensate for these artifacts. In this paper we want to follow this strategy. The cost function we use is a higher dimensional cost function which accounts for the sparseness of the measured signal in the spatial and temporal directions. This leads to the definition of a higher dimensional total variation. The method is validated using in vivo cardiac micro-CT mouse data. Additionally, we compare the results to phase-correlated reconstructions using the FDK algorithm and a total variation constrained reconstruction, where the total variation term is only defined in the spatial domain. The reconstructed datasets show strong improvements in terms of artifact reduction and low-contrast resolution compared to other methods. Thereby the temporal resolution of the reconstructed signal is not affected.