Image-Domain Material Decomposition for Spectral CT Using a Generalized Dictionary Learning

The spectral computed tomography (CT) has huge advantages by providing accurate material information. Unfortunately, due to the instability or overdetermination of the material decomposition model, the accuracy of material decomposition can be compromised in practice. Very recently, the dictionary learning-based image-domain material decomposition (DLIMD) can obtain high accuracy for material decompositions from reconstructed spectral CT images. This method can explore the correlation of material components to some extent by training a unified dictionary from all material images. In addition, the dictionary learning-based prior as a penalty is applied on material components independently, and many parameters would be carefully elaborated in practice. Because the concentration of contrast agent in clinical applications is low, it can result in data inconsistency for dictionary-based representation during the iteration process. To avoid the aforementioned limitations and further improve the accuracy of materials, we first construct a generalized DLIMD (GDLIMD) model. Then, the material tensor image is unfolded along the mode-1 to enhance the correlation of different materials. Finally, to avoid the data inconsistency of low iodine contrast, a normalization strategy is employed. Both physical phantom and tissue-synthetic phantom experiments demonstrate the proposed GDLIMD method outperforms the DLIMD and direct inversion (DI) methods.