Iterative image reconstruction in ECT

A series of preliminary studies has been performed in the authors laboratories to explore the use of a priori information in Bayesian image restoration and reconstruction. One piece of a priori information is the fact that intensities of neighboring pixels tend to be similar if they belong to the same region within which similar tissue characteristics are exhibited. this property of local continuity can be modeled by the use of Gibbs priors, as first suggested by German and Geman. In their investigation, they also included line sites between each pair of neighboring pixels in the Gibbs prior and used discrete binary numbers to indicate the absence or presence of boundaries between regions. These two features of the a priori model permit averaging within boundaries of homogeneous regions to alleviate the degradation caused by Poisson noise. with the use of this Gibbs prior in combination with the technique of stochastic relaxation, German and Geman demonstrated that noise levels can be reduced significantly in 2-D image restoration. They have developed a Bayesian method that utilizes a Gibbs prior to describe the spatial correlation of neighboring regions and takes into account the effect of limited spatial resolution as well. The statistical framework of the proposed approach is based on the data augmentation scheme suggested by Tanner and Wong. Briefly outlined here, this Bayesian method is based on Geman and Geman's approach