Experimental studies on few-view reconstruction for high-resolution micro-CT

High-resolution micro-CT offers 3D non-destructive imaging but scan times are prohibitively large in many cases. Advancements in image reconstruction offer great reduction in number of views while maintaining reconstruction accuracy; yet filtered back projection remains the de facto standard. An extensive study of few-view reconstruction using compressed-sensing based iterative techniques is carried out. Also, a novel 3D micro-CT phantom is proposed, and used for analyzing reconstruction accuracy. Numerical tests, and studies on real micro-CT data show that if measurement noise in projections is not extremely high, the number of views may be reduced to 1/8^{th} of the typically acquired view numbers. The study motivates the adoption of advanced reconstruction techniques to allow faster scanning, lower dosage, and reduced data size in high-resolution micro-CT.