MoVIT: A tomographic reconstruction framework for 4D-CT

Publication Type:

Journal Article

Source:

Optics Express, Volume 25, Issue 16, p.19236-19250 (2017)

Abstract:

4D computed tomography (4D-CT) aims to visualise the temporal dynamics of a 3D sample with a sufficiently high temporal and spatial resolution. Successive time frames are typically obtained by sequential scanning, followed by independent reconstruction of each 3D dataset. Such an approach requires a large number of projections for each scan to obtain images with sufficient quality (in terms of artefacts and SNR). Hence, there is a clear trade-off between the rotation speed of the gantry (i.e. time resolution) and the quality of the reconstructed images.
In this paper, the MotionVector-based Iterative Technique (MoVIT) is introduced which reconstructs a particular time frame by including the projections of neighbouring time frames as well. It is shown that such a strategy improves the trade-off between the rotation speed and the SNR.
The framework is tested on both numerical simulations and on 4D X-ray CT datasets of polyurethane foam under compression.
Results show that reconstructions obtained with MoVIT have a significantly higher SNR compared to the SNR of conventional 4D reconstructions.

Research area: