Clinical low dose CT image reconstruction using high-order total variation techniques

Total variation (TV) based iterative image reconstruction has been shown to possess desirable noise suppression and edge preservation characteristics. However, such approaches also produce "staircase effects" where intensity ramps are discretized into steps, resulting in images which appear blocky or patchy. In this paper, we present an improved regularization technique by incorporating higher-order derivatives to reduce staircase artifacts without sacrificing edge sharpness. In this preliminary investigation we demonstrate our approach using both phantom and clinical images acquired at 25% of conventional radiation dosage (i.e., 75% dose reduction).