Lose the Views: Limited Angle CT Reconstruction via Implicit Sinogram Completion

Rushil Anirudh, Hyojin Kim, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, K. Aditya Mohan, Kyle Champley, Timo Bremer; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 6343-6352

Computed Tomography (CT) reconstruction is a fundamental component to a wide variety of applications ranging from security, to healthcare. The classical techniques require measuring projections, called sinograms, from a full 180 degree view of the object. However, obtaining a full-view is not always feasible, such as when scanning irregular objects that limit flexibility of scanner rotation. The resulting limited angle sinograms are known to produce highly artifact-laden reconstructions with existing techniques. In this paper, we propose to address this problem using CTNet -- a system of 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks, that operates directly on a limited angle sinogram to predict the reconstruction. We use the x-ray transform on this prediction to obtain a ``completed'' sinogram, as if it came from a full 180 degree view. We feed this to standard analytical and iterative reconstruction techniques to obtain the final reconstruction. We show with extensive experimentation on a challenging real world dataset that this combined strategy outperforms many competitive baselines. We also propose a measure of confidence for the reconstruction that enables a practitioner to gauge the reliability of a prediction made by CTNet. We show that this measure is a strong indicator of quality as measured by the PSNR, while not requiring ground truth at test time. Finally, using a segmentation experiment, we show that our reconstruction also preserves the 3D structure of objects better than existing solutions.