Low-dose spectral CT reconstruction using image gradient ℓ0–norm and tensor dictionary

Spectral computed tomography (CT) has a great superiority in lesion detection, tissue characterization and material decomposition. To further extend its potential clinical applications, in this work, we propose an improved tensor dictionary learning method for low-dose spectral CT reconstruction with a constraint of image gradient ℓ₀-norm, which is named as ℓ₀TDL. The ℓ₀TDL method inherits the advantages of tensor dictionary learning (TDL) by employing the similarity of spectral CT images. On the other hand, by introducing the ℓ₀-norm constraint in gradient image domain, the proposed method emphasizes the spatial sparsity to overcome the weakness of TDL on preserving edge information. The split-bregman method is employed to solve the proposed method. Both numerical simulations and real mouse studies are perform to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that the proposed ℓ₀TDL method outperforms other competing methods, such as total variation (TV) minimization, TV with low rank (TV+LR), and TDL methods.