Image reconstruction model for limited-angle CT based on prior image induced relative total variation

Limited-angle computed tomography (CT) reconstruction has a great potential to reduce X-ray radiation dose or scanning time. Suppressing shading artifacts is challenging, but of great practical significance in limited-angle CT. Traditional methods based on total variation (TV) cannot effectively remove the shading artifacts, prior image constrained compressed sensing (PICCS) is a promising method, but is sensitive to the quality of the prior image. In micro-CT, a prior image reconstructed by filtered back-projection (FBP) may contain high-level noise. An image reconstructed by PICCS tends to inherit both structures and noise of the prior image. In this study, to suppress noise and shading artifacts, we propose a new limited-angle CT reconstruction model called prior image induced relative total variation (piiRTV), that uses the structure information of a prior image to guide limited-angle CT reconstruction. The proposed piiRTV is compared to TV and PICCS. Numerical simulations and experiments on real CT projections demonstrate the effectiveness of piiRTV in suppression of noise and shading artifacts. In addition, the proposed piiRTV is more robust to the prior image quality than PICCS.