查看文章

Dual energy CT (DECT) imaging plays an important role in advanced imaging applications due to its capability of material decomposition. Direct decomposition via matrix inversion suffers from significant degradation of image signal‐to‐noise ratios, which reduces clinical values of DECT. Existing denoising algorithms achieve suboptimal performance since they suppress image noise either before or after the decomposition and do not fully explore the noise statistical properties of the decomposition process. In this work, the authors propose an iterative image‐domain decomposition method for noise suppression in DECT, using the full variance‐covariance matrix of the decomposed images.

The proposed algorithm is formulated in the form of least‐square estimation with smoothness regularization. Based on the design principles of a best linear unbiased estimator, the authors include the …