Fast stimulated Raman projection tomography with iterative reconstruction from sparse projections

As an emerging volumetric imaging technique, Stimulated Raman projection tomography (SRPT) can provide quantitative distribution of chemical components in a three-dimensional (3D) volume, with a label-free manner. Currently, the filtered back-projection (FBP) algorithm is used to reconstruct the 3D volume in SRPT. However, to obtain a satisfactory reconstruction result, the FBP algorithm requires a certain amount of projection data, usually, at least 180 projections in a half circle. This leads to a long data acquisition time and hence limits dynamic and longitudinal observation of living systems. Iterative reconstruction from sparsely sampled data may reduce the total data acquisition time by reducing the projections used in the reconstruction. In this work, two total variation regularization based iterative reconstruction algorithms were selected and used in SRPT, including the simultaneous algebra reconstruction technique (SART) and the two-step iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm (TwIST). The well-known distance-driven model was utilized as the forward and back-projectors. We evaluated these two algorithms with numerical simulations. Using the original image as the reference, we calculated the quality of the reconstructed images. Simulation results showed that both the SART and TwIST performed better than the FBP algorithm, with larger values of the structural similarity (SSIM). Furthermore, the number of projection images can be largely reduced when the iterative reconstruction algorithm was used. Especially when the SART was used, the projection number can be reduced to 15, providing a satisfactory reconstruction image (SSIM is larger than 0.9).