Achieving high-quality reconstructions from low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) measurements is of much importance in clinical settings. Model-based image reconstruction methods have been proven to be effective in removing artifacts in LDCT. In this work, we propose an approach to learn a rich two-layer clustering-based sparsifying transform model (MCST2), where image patches and their subsequent feature maps (filter residuals) are clustered into groups with different learned sparsifying filters per group. We investigate a penalized weighted least squares (PWLS) approach for LDCT reconstruction incorporating learned MCST2 priors. Experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed PWLS-MCST2 approach compared to other related recent schemes.
@article{arxiv.2011.00428,
title = {Two-layer clustering-based sparsifying transform learning for low-dose CT reconstruction},
author = {Xikai Yang and Yong Long and Saiprasad Ravishankar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.00428},
year = {2020}
}