Feasibility Study for Improving the Image Characteristics in Digital Tomosynthesis (DTS) Using a Compressed-Sensing (Cs)-Based Pre-Deblurring Scheme

ABSTRACTDigital tomosynthesis (DTS) has been widely used in both industrial nondestructive testing and medical x-ray imaging as a popular multiplanar imaging modality. However, although it provides some of the tomographic benefits of computed tomography (CT) at reduced dose and imaging time, the image characteristics are relatively poor due to blur artifacts originated from incomplete data sampling for a limited angular range and also aspects inherent to imaging system, including finite focal spot size of the x-ray source, detector resolution, etc. In this work, in order to overcome these difficulties, we propose an intuitive method in which a compressed-sensing (CS)-based deblurring scheme is applied to the projection images before common DTS reconstruction. We implemented the proposed deblurring algorithm and performed a systematic experiment to demonstrate its viability for improving the image characteristics in DTS. According to our results, the proposed method appears to be effective for the blurring...