Registration based super-resolution reconstruction for lung 4D-CT

Lung 4D-CT plays an important role in lung cancer radiotherapy for tumor localization and treatment planning. In lung 4D-CT data, the resolution in the slice direction is often much lower than the in-plane resolution. For multi-plane display, isotropic resolution is necessary, but the commonly used interpolation operation will blur the images. In this paper, we present a registration based method for super resolution enhancement of the 4D-CT multi-plane images. Our working premise is that the low-resolution images of different phases at the corresponding position can be regarded as input "frames" to reconstruct high resolution images. First, we employ the Demons registration algorithm to estimate the motion field between different "frames". Then, the projections onto convex sets (POCS) approach is employed to reconstruction high-resolution lung images. We show that our method can get clearer lung images and enhance image structure, compared with the cubic spline interpolation and back projection method.