Conjugate-Gradient Preconditioning Methods for Shift-Variant PET Image Reconstruction

Gradient-based iterative methods often converge slowly for tomographic image reconstruction and image restoration problems, but can be accelerated by suitable preconditioners. Diagonal preconditioners offer some improvement in convergence rate, but do not incorporate the structure of the Hessian matrices in imaging problems. Circulant preconditioners can provide remarkable acceleration for inverse problems that are approximately shift-invariant, i.e., for those with approximately block-Toeplitz or block-circulant Hessians. However, in applications with nonuniform noise variance, such as arises from Poisson statistics in emission tomography and in quantum-limited optical imaging, the Hessian of the weighted least-squares objective function is quite shift-variant, and circulant preconditioners perform poorly. Additional shift-variance is caused by edge-preserving regularization methods based on nonquadratic penalty functions. This paper describes new preconditioners that approximate more accurately the Hessian matrices of shift-variant imaging problems. Compared to diagonal or circulant preconditioning, the new preconditioners lead to significantly faster convergence rates for the unconstrained conjugate-gradient (CG) iteration. We also propose a new efficient method for the line-search step required by CG methods. Applications to positron emission tomography (PET) illustrate the method.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/85979/1/Fessler85.pd

Preconditioning Methods for Shift-Variant Image Reconstruction

Preconditioning methods can accelerate the convergence of gradient-based iterative methods for tomographic image reconstruction and image restoration. Circulant preconditioners have been used extensively for shift-invariant problems. Diagonal preconditioners offer some improvement in convergence rate, but do not incorporate the structure of the Hessian matrices in imaging problems. For inverse problems that are approximately shift-invariant (i.e. approximately block-Toeplitz or block-circulant Hessians), circulant or Fourier-based preconditioners can provide remarkable acceleration. However, in applications with nonuniform noise variance (such as arises from Poisson statistics in emission tomography and in quantum-limited optical imaging), the Hessian of the (penalized) weighted least-squares objective function is quite shift-variant, and the Fourier preconditioner performs poorly. Additional shift-variance is caused by edge-preserving regularization methods based on nonquadratic penalty functions. This paper describes new preconditioners that more accurately approximate the Hessian matrices of shift-variant imaging problems. Compared to diagonal or Fourier preconditioning, the new preconditioners lead to significantly faster convergence rates for the unconstrained conjugate-gradient (CG) iteration. Applications to position emission tomography (PET) illustrate the method.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/85856/1/Fessler147.pd

Fully 3D PET Image Reconstruction Using A Fourier Preconditioned Conjugate-Gradient Algorithm

Since the data sixes in fully 3D PET imaging are very large, iterative image reconstruction algorithms must converge in very few iterations to be useful. One can improve the convergence rate of the conjugate-gradient (CG) algorithm by incorporating preconditioning operators that approximate the inverse of the Hessian of the objective function. If the 3D cylindrical PET geometry were not truncated at the ends, then the Hessian of the penalized least-squares objective function would be approximately shift-invariant, i.e. G'G would be nearly block-circulant, where G is the system matrix. The authors propose a Fourier preconditioner based on this shift-invariant approximation to the Hessian. Results show that this preconditioner significantly accelerates the convergence of the CG algorithm with only a small increase in computation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86015/1/Fessler139.pd

First order algorithms in variational image processing

Variational methods in imaging are nowadays developing towards a quite universal and flexible tool, allowing for highly successful approaches on tasks like denoising, deblurring, inpainting, segmentation, super-resolution, disparity, and optical flow estimation. The overall structure of such approaches is of the form ${\cal D}(Ku) + \alpha {\cal R} (u) \rightarrow \min_u$ ; where the functional ${\cal D}$ is a data fidelity term also depending on some input data $f$ and measuring the deviation of $Ku$ from such and ${\cal R}$ is a regularization functional. Moreover $K$ is a (often linear) forward operator modeling the dependence of data on an underlying image, and $\alpha$ is a positive regularization parameter. While ${\cal D}$ is often smooth and (strictly) convex, the current practice almost exclusively uses nonsmooth regularization functionals. The majority of successful techniques is using nonsmooth and convex functionals like the total variation and generalizations thereof or $\ell_1$-norms of coefficients arising from scalar products with some frame system. The efficient solution of such variational problems in imaging demands for appropriate algorithms. Taking into account the specific structure as a sum of two very different terms to be minimized, splitting algorithms are a quite canonical choice. Consequently this field has revived the interest in techniques like operator splittings or augmented Lagrangians. Here we shall provide an overview of methods currently developed and recent results as well as some computational studies providing a comparison of different methods and also illustrating their success in applications.Comment: 60 pages, 33 figure

Fast, Iterative Image Reconstruction for MRI in the Presence of Field Inhomogeneities

In magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic field inhomogeneities cause distortions in images that are reconstructed by conventional fast Fourier transform (FFT) methods. Several noniterative image reconstruction methods are used currently to compensate for field inhomogeneities, but these methods assume that the field map that characterizes the off-resonance frequencies is spatially smooth. Recently, iterative methods have been proposed that can circumvent this assumption and provide improved compensation for off-resonance effects. However, straightforward implementations of such iterative methods suffer from inconveniently long computation times. This paper describes a tool for accelerating iterative reconstruction of field-corrected MR images: a novel time-segmented approximation to the MR signal equation. We use a min-max formulation to derive the temporal interpolator. Speedups of around 60 were achieved by combining this temporal interpolator with a nonuniform fast Fourier transform with normalized root mean squared approximation errors of 0.07%. The proposed method provides fast, accurate, field-corrected image reconstruction even when the field map is not smooth.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86010/1/Fessler69.pd

An Accelerated Iterative Reweighted Least Squares Algorithm for Compressed Sensing MRI

Compressed sensing for MRI (CS-MRI) attempts to recover an object from undersampled k-space data by minimizing sparsity-promoting regularization criteria. The iterative reweighted least squares (IRLS) algorithm can perform the minimization task by solving iteration-dependent linear systems, recursively. However, this process can be slow as the associated linear system is often poorly conditioned for ill-posed problems. We propose a new scheme based on the matrix inversion lemma (MIL) to accelerate the solving process. We demonstrate numerically for CS-MRI that our method provides significant speed-up compared to linear and nonlinear conjugate gradient algorithms, thus making it a promising alternative for such applications.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/85957/1/Fessler250.pd

Direct estimation of kinetic parametric images for dynamic PET.

Dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) can monitor spatiotemporal distribution of radiotracer in vivo. The spatiotemporal information can be used to estimate parametric images of radiotracer kinetics that are of physiological and biochemical interests. Direct estimation of parametric images from raw projection data allows accurate noise modeling and has been shown to offer better image quality than conventional indirect methods, which reconstruct a sequence of PET images first and then perform tracer kinetic modeling pixel-by-pixel. Direct reconstruction of parametric images has gained increasing interests with the advances in computing hardware. Many direct reconstruction algorithms have been developed for different kinetic models. In this paper we review the recent progress in the development of direct reconstruction algorithms for parametric image estimation. Algorithms for linear and nonlinear kinetic models are described and their properties are discussed