High-Quality Volumetric Reconstruction on Optimal Lattices for Computed Tomography

High-Quality Volumetric Reconstruction on Optimal Lattices for Computed Tomography

Abstract

Within the context of emission tomography, we study volumetric reconstruction methods based on the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. We show, for the first time, the equivalence of the standard implementation of the EM-based reconstruction with an implementation based on hardware-accelerated volume rendering for nearest-neighbor (NN) interpolation. This equivalence suggests that higher-order kernels should be used with caution and do not necessarily lead to better performance. We also show that the EM algorithm can easily be adapted for different lattices, the body-centered cubic (BCC) one in particular. For validation purposes, we use the 3D version of the Shepp-Logan synthetic phantom, for which we derive closed-form analytical expressions of the projection data. The experimental results show the theoretically-predicted optimality of NN interpolation in combination with the EM algorithm, for both the noiseless and the noisy case. Moreover, reconstruction on the BCC lattice leads to superior accuracy, more compact data representation, and better noise reduction compared to the Cartesian one. Finally, we show the usefulness of the proposed method for optical projection tomography of a mouse embryo.

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Authors
  • Finkbeiner, Bernhard
  • Alim, Usman R.
  • Van De Ville, Dimitri
  • Möller, Torsten
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Supplemental Material
Shortfacts
Category
Journal Paper
Divisions
Visualization and Data Analysis
Journal or Publication Title
Computer Graphics Forum: the international journal of the Eurographics Association
ISSN
01677055
Page Range
pp. 1023-1030
Number
3
Volume
28
Date
2009
Official URL
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01445.x
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