Average consistency: A superior way of using the composite image to boost dynamic CT reconstruction

Dynamic imaging (such as computed tomography (CT) perfusion, dynamic CT angiography, dynamic positron emission tomography, four-dimensional CT, etc.) is widely used in the clinic. The multiple-scan mechanism of dynamic imaging results in greatly increased radiation dose and prolonged acquisition time. To deal with these problems, low-mAs or sparse-view protocols are usually adopted, which lead to noisy or incomplete data for each frame. To obtain high-quality images from the corrupted data, a popular strategy is to incorporate the composite image that reconstructed using the full dataset into the iterative reconstruction procedure. Previous studies have tried to enforce each frame to approach the composite image in each iteration, which, however, introduces mixed temporal information into each frame. In this paper, we propose an average consistency (AC) model for dynamic CT image reconstruction. The core idea of AC is to enforce the average of all frames to approach the composite image in each iteration, which preserves image edges and noise characteristics while avoids the invasion of mixed temporal information. Experiment on a dynamic phantom and a patient for CT perfusion imaging shows that the proposed method obtains the best qualitative and quantitative results. We conclude that the AC model is a general framework and a superior way of using the composite image for dynamic CT reconstruction.