A U-Nets Cascade for Sparse View Computed Tomography

We propose a new convolutional neural network architecture for image reconstruction in sparse view computed tomography. The proposed network consists of a cascade of U-nets and data consistency layers. While the U-nets address the undersampling artifacts, the data consistency layers model the specific scanner geometry and make direct use of measured data. We train the network cascade end-to-end on sparse view cardiac CT images. The proposed network’s performance is evaluated according to different quantitative measures and compared to the one of a cascade with fully convolutional neural networks with residual connections and to the one of a single U-net with approximately the same number of trainable parameters. While in both experiments the methods show similar performance in terms of quantitative measures, our proposed U-nets cascade yields superior visual results and better preserves the overall image structure as well as fine diagnostic details, e.g. the coronary arteries. The latter is also confirmed by a statistically significant increase of the Haar-wavelet-based perceptual similarity index measure in all the experiments.