Dictionary learning based sinogram inpainting for CT sparse reconstruction

In CT (computed tomography), reconstruction from undersampling projection data is often ill-posed and suffers from severe artifact in the reconstructed images. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a sinogram inpainting method based on recently rising sparse representation technology. In this approach, a dictionary learning based inpainting is used to estimate the missing projection data. The final image can be reconstructed by the analytic filtered back projection (FBP) reconstruction. We conduct experiments using both simulated and real phantom data. Compared to the comparative interpolation method, visual and numerical results validate the clinical potential of the proposed method.