TMAA-net: tensor-domain multi-planal anti-aliasing network for sparse-view CT image reconstruction

<i>Objective.</i>Among various deep-network-based sparse-view CT image reconstruction studies, the sinogram upscaling network has been predominantly employed to synthesize additional view information. However, the performance of the sinogram-based network is limited in terms of removing aliasing streak artifacts and recovering low-contrast small structures. In this study, we used a view-by-view back-projection (VVBP) tensor-domain network to overcome such limitations of the sinogram-based approaches.<i>Approach.</i>The proposed method offers advantages of addressing the aliasing artifacts directly in the 3D tensor domain over the 2D sinogram. In the tensor-domain network, the multi-planal anti-aliasing modules were used to remove artifacts within the coronal and sagittal tensor planes. In addition, the data-fidelity-based refinement module was also implemented to successively process output images of the tensor network to recover image sharpness and textures.<i>Main result.</i>The proposed method showed outperformance in terms of removing aliasing artifacts and recovering low-contrast details compared to other state-of-the-art sinogram-based networks. The performance was validated for both numerical and clinical projection data in a circular fan-beam CT configuration.<i>Significance.</i>We observed that view-by-view aliasing artifacts in sparse-view CT exhibit distinct patterns within the tensor planes, making them effectively removable in high-dimensional representations. Additionally, we demonstrated that the co-domain characteristics of tensor space processing offer higher generalization performance for aliasing artifact removal compared to conventional sinogram-domain processing.