No abstract

The maximum-likelihood expectation-maximization (ML-EM) algorithm is used for an iterative image reconstruction (IIR) method and performs well with respect to the inverse problem as cross-entropy minimization in computed tomography. For accelerating the convergence rate of the ML-EM, the ordered-subsets expectation-maximization (OS-EM) with a power factor is effective. In this paper, we propose a continuous analog to the power-based accelerated OS-EM algorithm. The continuoustime image reconstruction (CIR) system is described by nonlinear differential equations with piecewise smooth vector fields by a cyclic switching process. A numerical discretization of the differential equation by using the geometric multiplicative first-order expansion of the nonlinear vector field leads to an exact equivalent iterative formula of the power-based OS-EM. The convergence of nonnegatively constrained solutions to a globally stable equilibrium is guaranteed by the Lyapunov theorem for consistent inverse problems. We illustrate through numerical experiments that the convergence characteristics of the continuous system have the highest quality compared with that of discretization methods. We clarify how important the discretization method approximates the solution of the CIR to design a better IIR method.

Iterative reconstruction (IR) algorithms based on the principle of optimization are known for producing better reconstructed images in computed tomography. In this paper, we present an IR algorithm based on minimizing a symmetrized Kullback-Leibler divergence (SKLD) that is called Jeffreys’ J-divergence. The SKLD with iterative steps is guaranteed to decrease in convergence monotonically using a continuous dynamical method for consistent inverse problems. Specifically, we construct an autonomous differential equation for which the proposed iterative formula gives a first-order numerical discretization and demonstrate the stability of a desired solution using Lyapunov’s theorem. We describe a hybrid Euler method combined with additive and multiplicative calculus for constructing an effective and robust discretization method, thereby enabling us to obtain an approximate solution to the differential equation. We performed experiments and found that the IR algorithm derived from the hybrid discretization achieved high performance.

The problem of tomographic image reconstruction can be reduced to an optimization problem of finding unknown pixel values subject to minimizing the difference between the measured and forward projections. Iterative image reconstruction algorithms provide significant improvements over transform methods in computed tomography. In this paper, we present an extended class of power-divergence measures (PDMs), which includes a large set of distance and relative entropy measures, and propose an iterative reconstruction algorithm based on the extended PDM (EPDM) as an objective function for the optimization strategy. For this purpose, we introduce a system of nonlinear differential equations whose Lyapunov function is equivalent to the EPDM. Then, we derive an iterative formula by multiplicative discretization of the continuous-time system. Since the parameterized EPDM family includes the Kullback–Leibler divergence, the resulting iterative algorithm is a natural extension of the maximum-likelihood expectation-maximization (MLEM) method. We conducted image reconstruction experiments using noisy projection data and found that the proposed algorithm outperformed MLEM and could reconstruct high-quality images that were robust to measured noise by properly selecting parameters.