A high-speed computerized tomography image reconstruction using direct two-dimensional Fourier transform method

The nescessity for developing real-time computerized tomography (CT) aiming at the dynamic observation of organs such as hearts has lately been advocated. It is necessary for its realization to reconstruct the images which are markedly faster than present CTs. Although various reconstructing methods have been proposed so far, the method practically employed at present is the filtered backprojection (FBP) method only, which can give high quality image reconstruction, but takes much computing time. In the past, the two-dimensional Fourier transform (TFT) method was regarded as unsuitable to practical use because the quality of images obtained was not good, in spite of the promising method for high speed reconstruction because of its less computing time. However, since it was revealed that the image quality by TFT method depended greatly on interpolation accuracy in two-dimensional Fourier space, the authors have developed a high-speed calculation algorithm that can obtain high quality images by pursuing the relationship between the image quality and the interpolation method. In this case, radial data sampling points in Fourier space are increased to β-th power of 2 times, and the linear or spline interpolation is used. Comparison of this method with the present FBP method resulted in the conclusion that the image quality is almost the same in practical image matrix, the computational time by TFT method becomes about 1/10 of FBP method, and the memory capacity also reduces by about 20 %. (Wakatsuki, Y.)