Low-dose photon counting CT reconstruction bias reduction with multi-energy alternating minimization algorithm.

Photon counting CT (PCCT) is an x-ray imaging technique that has undergone great development in the past decade. PCCT has the potential to improve dose efficiency and low-dose performance. In this paper, we propose a statistics-based iterative algorithm to perform a direct reconstruction of material-decomposed images. Compared with the conventional sinogram-based decomposition method which has degraded performance in low-dose scenarios, the multi-energy alternating minimization algorithm for photon counting CT (MEAM-PCCT) can generate accurate material-decomposed image with much smaller biases.