Rank-sparsity constrained, spectro-temporal reconstruction for retrospectively gated, dynamic CT
Relative to prospective projection gating, retrospective projection gating for dynamic CT applications allows fast imaging times, minimizing the potential for physiological and anatomic variability. Preclinically, fast imaging is attractive due to the rapid clearance of low molecular weight contrast agents and the rapid heart rate of rodents. Clinically, retrospective gating is relevant for intraoperative C-arm CT. More generally, retrospective sampling provides an opportunity for significant reduction in x-ray dose within the framework of compressive sensing theory and sparsity-constrained iterative reconstruction. Even so, CT reconstruction from projections with random temporal sampling is a very poorly conditioned inverse problem, requiring high fidelity regularization to minimize variability in the reconstructed results. Here, we introduce a highly novel data acquisition and regularization strategy for spectro-temporal (5D) CT reconstruction from retrospectively gated projections. We show that by taking advantage of the rank-sparse structure and separability of the temporal and spectral reconstruction sub-problems, being able to solve each sub-problem independently effectively guarantees that we can solve both problems together. In this paper, we show 4D simulation results (2D + 2 energies + time) using the proposed technique and compare them with two competing techniques - spatio-temporal total variation minimization and prior image constrained compressed sensing. We also show in vivo, 5D (3D + 2 energies + time) myocardial injury data acquired in a mouse, reconstructing 20 data sets (10 phases, 2 energies) and performing material decomposition from data acquired over a single rotation (360°, dose: ∼60 mGy).
