Background: Dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) is a widely used and actively researched imaging modality that can estimate the physical properties of an object more accurately than single-energy CT (SECT). Recently, iterative reconstruction methods called one-step methods have received attention among various approaches since they can resolve the intermingled limitations of the conventional methods. However, the one-step methods typically have expensive computational costs, and their material decomposition performance is largely affected by the accuracy in the spectral coefficients estimation.
Objective: In this study, we aim to develop an efficient one-step algorithm that can effectively decompose into the basis material maps and is less sensitive to the accuracy of the spectral coefficients.
Methods: By use of a new loss function that employs the non-linear forward model and the weighted squared errors, we propose a one-step reconstruction algorithm named generalized simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (GSART). The proposed algorithm was compared with the image-domain material decomposition and other existing one-step reconstruction algorithm.
Results: In both simulation and experimental studies, we demonstrated that the proposed algorithm effectively reduced the beam-hardening artifacts thereby increasing the accuracy in the material decomposition.
Conclusions: The proposed one-step reconstruction for material decomposition in dual-energy CT outperformed the image-domain approach and the existing one-step algorithm. We believe that the proposed method is a practically very useful addition to the material-selective image reconstruction field.
Keywords: Dual-energy CT; X-ray imaging; computed tomography (CT); iterative reconstruction; material decomposition; one-step method.