Direct reconstruction of enhanced signal in computed tomography perfusion

High imaging dose has been a concern in computed tomography perfusion (CTP) as repeated scans are performed at the same location of a patient. On the other hand, signal changes only occur at limited regions in CT acquired at different time points. In this work, we propose a new reconstruction strategy by effectively utilizing the initial phase high-quality CT to reconstruct the later phase CT acquired with a low-dose protocol. In the proposed strategy, initial high-quality CT is considered as a base image and enhanced signal (ES) is reconstructed directly by minimizing the penalized weighted least-square (PWLS) criterion. The proposed PWLS-ES strategy converts the conventional CT reconstruction into a sparse signal reconstruction problem. Digital and anthropomorphic phantom studies were performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed PWLS-ES strategy. Both phantom studies show that the proposed PWLS-ES method outperforms the standard iterative CT reconstruction algorithm based on the same PWLS criterion according to various quantitative metrics including root mean squared error (RMSE) and the universal quality index (UQI).