Concerning the streak artifacts and impulse noise of the Low-Dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) reconstructed images, a statistical iterative reconstruction method based on adaptive weighted Total Variation (TV) for LDCT was presented. Considering the shortage that traditional TV may bring staircase effect while suppressing streak artifacts, an adaptive weighted TV model that combined the weighting factor based on weighted variation and TV model was proposed. Then, the new model was applied to the Penalized Weighted Least Square (PWLS). Different areas of the image were processed with different de-noising intensities, so as to achieve a good effect of noise suppression and edge preservation. The Shepp-Logan model and the digital pelvis phantom were used to test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method has smaller Normalized Mean Square Distance (NMSD) and Normal Average Absolute Distance (NAAD) in the two experiment images, compared with the Filtered Back Projection (FBP), PWLS, PWLS-Median Prior (PWLS-MP) and PWLS-TV algorithms. Meanwhile, the proposed method get Peak Signal-To-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 40.91 dB and 42.25 dB respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can well preserve image details and edges, while eliminating streak artifacts effectively.

A new denoising algorithm, Adaptive Total Generalized Variation (ATGV), was proposed for removing streak artifacts within the reconstructed image of low-dose Computed Tomography (CT). Considering the shortage that the traditional Total Generalized Variation (TGV) would blur the edge details, the intuitionistic fuzzy entropy which can distinguish the smooth and detail regions was introduced into the TGV algorithm. Different areas of the image were processed with different denoising intensities. As a result, the image details could be well preserved. Firstly, the Filtered Back Projection (FBP) algorithm was used to obtain a reconstructed image. Secondly, the edge indicator function based on intuitive fuzzy entropy was applied to improve the TGV algorithm. Finally, the new algorithm was employed to reduce the noise in the reconstructed image. The simulations of the low-dose CT image reconstruction for the Shepp-Logan model and the thorax phantom were used to test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has the smaller values of the Normalized Mean Square Distance (NMSD) and Normalized Average Absolute Distance (NAAD) in the two experiment images, compared with the Total Variation (TV) algorithm and TGV algorithm. Meanwhile, the two experiment images processed with the new method can obtain high Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNR) of 26.90 dB and 44.58 dB, respectively. So the proposed algorithm can effectively preserve image details and edges, while reducing streak artifacts.