Towards clinical-dose grating interferometry breast CT with fused intensity-based iterative reconstruction

Opt Express. 2023 Feb 27;31(5):9052-9071. doi: 10.1364/OE.484123.

Abstract

X-ray grating interferometry CT (GI-CT) is an emerging imaging modality which provides three complementary contrasts that could increase the diagnostic content of clinical breast CT: absorption, phase, and dark-field. Yet, reconstructing the three image channels under clinically compatible conditions is challenging because of severe ill-conditioning of the tomographic reconstruction problem. In this work we propose to solve this problem with a novel reconstruction algorithm that assumes a fixed relation between the absorption and the phase-contrast channel to reconstruct a single image by automatically fusing the absorption and phase channels. The results on both simulations and real data show that, enabled by the proposed algorithm, GI-CT outperforms conventional CT at a clinical dose.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Contrast Media
  • Interferometry
  • Microscopy, Phase-Contrast
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed*

Substances

  • Contrast Media