Full Dose CT Database Induced Reconstruction With Nonlocal Means Prior for Ultra-Low-Dose Lung CT: A Preliminary Study

Although Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is the most effective way for early lung cancer screening, it's still a challenge to further reduce radiation dose on the premise of ensuring image quality. Penalized weighted least-squares (PWLS) image reconstruction with nonlocal means (NLM) prior has shown excellent performance to improve the image quality for LDCT, especially when the nonlocal weights are calculated from previous full-dose CT...