Since its recent inception, simultaneous image reconstruction for multimodality fusion has received a great deal of attention due to its superior imaging performance. On the other hand, the compressed sensing (CS)-based image reconstruction methods have undergone a rapid development because of their ability to significantly reduce the amount of raw data. In this work, we combine computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) into a single CS-based reconstruction framework. From a theoretical viewpoint, the CS-based reconstruction methods require prior sparsity knowledge to perform reconstruction. In addition to the conventional data fidelity term, the multimodality imaging information is utilized to improve the reconstruction quality. Prior information in this context is that most of the medical images can be approximated as piecewise constant model, and the discrete gradient transform (DGT), whose norm is the total variation (TV), can serve as a sparse representation. More importantly, the multimodality images from the same object must share structural similarity, which can be captured by DGT. The prior information on similar distributions from the sparse DGTs is employed to improve the CT and MRI image quality synergistically for a CT-MRI scanner platform. Numerical simulation with undersampled CT and MRI datasets is conducted to demonstrate the merits of the proposed hybrid image reconstruction approach. Our preliminary results confirm that the proposed method outperforms the conventional CT and MRI reconstructions when they are applied separately.

Date Published: 11 September 2014
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9212, Developments in X-Ray Tomography IX, 92121D (11 September 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2062602

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9212:
Developments in X-Ray Tomography IX
Stuart R. Stock, Editor(s)