Experimental study on the application of a compressed-sensing (CS) algorithm to dental cone-beam CT (CBCT) for accurate, low-dose image reconstruction

In practical applications of three-dimensional (3D) tomographic imaging, there are often challenges for image reconstruction from insufficient data. In computed tomography (CT); for example, image reconstruction from few views would enable fast scanning with reduced doses to the patient. In this study, we investigated and implemented an efficient reconstruction method based on a compressed-sensing (CS) algorithm, which exploits the sparseness of the gradient image with substantially high accuracy, for accurate, low-dose dental cone-beam CT (CBCT) reconstruction. We applied the algorithm to a commercially-available dental CBCT system (Expert7 (TM), Vatech Co., Korea) and performed experimental works to demonstrate the algorithm for image reconstruction in insufficient sampling problems. We successfully reconstructed CBCT images from several undersampled data and evaluated the reconstruction quality in terms of the universal-quality index (UQI). Experimental demonstrations of the CS-based reconstruction algorithm appear to show that it can be applied to current dental CBCT systems for reducing imaging doses and improving the image quality.