A Linear Programming Approach to Limited Angle 3D Reconstruction from DSA Projections

OBJECTIVES We investigate the feasibility of binary-valued 3D tomographic reconstruction using only a small number of projections acquired over a limited range of angles. METHODS Regularization of this strongly ill-posed problem is achieved by (i) confining the reconstruction to binary vessel/non-vessel decisions, and (ii) by minimizing a global functional involving a smoothness prior. RESULTS Our approach successfully reconstructs volumetric vessel structures from three projections taken within 90 degrees. The percentage of reconstructed voxels differing from ground truth is below 1%. CONCLUSION We demonstrate that for particular applications--like Digital Subtraction Angiography--3D reconstructions are possible where conventional methods must fail, due to a severely limited imaging geometry. This could play an important role for dose reduction and 3D reconstruction using non-conventional technical setups.