A deep learning architecture for limited-angle computed tomography reconstruction

Abstract

Limited-angle computed tomography suffers from missing data in the projection domain, which results in intensity inhomogeneities and streaking artifacts in the image domain. We address both challenges by a two-step deep learning architecture: First, we learn compensation weights that account for the missing data in the projection domain and correct for intensity changes. Second, we formulate an image restoration problem as a variational network to eliminate coherent streaking artifacts. We perform our experiments on realistic data and we achieve superior results for destreaking compared to state-of-the-art non-linear filtering methods in literature. We show that our approach eliminates the need for manual tuning and enables joint optimization of both correction schemes.