Full-Spectrum-Knowledge-Aware Tensor Model for Energy-Resolved CT Iterative Reconstruction

Energy-resolved computed tomography (ErCT) with a photon counting detector concurrently produces multiple CT images corresponding to different photon energy ranges. It has the potential to generate energy-dependent images with improved contrast-to-noise ratio and sufficient material-specific information. Since the number of detected photons in one energy bin in ErCT is smaller than that in conventional energy-integrating CT (EiCT), ErCT images are inherently more noisy than EiCT images, which leads to increased noise and bias in the subsequent material estimation. In this work, we first deeply analyze the intrinsic tensor properties of two-dimensional (2D) ErCT images acquired in different energy bins and then present a Full-Spectrum-knowledge-aware Tensor analysis and processing (FSTensor) method for ErCT reconstruction to suppress noise-induced artifacts to obtain high-quality ErCT images and high-accuracy material images. The presented method is based on three considerations: (1) 2D ErCT images obtained in different energy bins can be treated as a 3-order tensor with three modes, i.e., width, height and energy bin, and a rich global correlation exists among the three modes, which can be characterized by tensor decomposition. (2) There is a locally piecewise smooth property in the 3-order ErCT images, and it can be captured by a tensor total variation regularization. (3) The images from the full spectrum are much better than the ErCT images with respect to noise variance and structural details and serve as external information to improve the reconstruction performance. We then develop an alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm to numerically solve the presented FSTensor method. We further utilize a genetic algorithm to tackle the parameter selection in ErCT reconstruction, instead of manually determining parameters. Simulation, preclinical and synthesized clinical ErCT results demonstrate that the presented FSTensor method leads to significant improvements over the filtered back-projection, robust principal component analysis, tensor-based dictionary learning and low-rank tensor decomposition with spatial-temporal total variation methods.