Abstract: Low-dose single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging can reduce the radiation damage to human bodies caused by radioactive tracers, and hence it is becoming more and more important in clinical practice. In a SPECT system, low-dose imaging can be achieved by acquiring projection data of sparse-view. The sparse-view projection data, if directly reconstructed by conventional iterative reconstruction methods, will inevitably lead to severe ray artifacts in the image domain. Existing clinical reconstruction methods usually introduce specific regularization to the optimization model to suppress ray artifacts. However, this type of methods may not adapt to projection data with various dosage, and the form of regularization heavily depends on prior knowledge. A novel neural network architecture is proposed to learn the mapping from the sparse-view projection data to the full-view projection data. The projection data of missing view angle is synthesized by the proposed neural network to improve the quality of reconstructed images. Numerical experiments show that, compared with the traditional iterative reconstruction method, the SSIM of the reconstructed image is increased by 59%, the NMSE is reduced by 67%, and the PSNR is increased by 2.48 dB. Therefore, the proposed method can better improve the image quality of sparse-view projection data.

Key words: neural network, SPECT reconstruction, residual learning, U-Net