Continuous Analog of Accelerated OS-EM Algorithm for Computed Tomography

The maximum-likelihood expectation-maximization (ML-EM) algorithm is used for an iterative image reconstruction (IIR) method and performs well with respect to the inverse problem as cross-entropy minimization in computed tomography. For accelerating the convergence rate of the ML-EM, the ordered-subsets expectation-maximization (OS-EM) with a power factor is effective. In this paper, we propose a continuous analog to the power-based accelerated OS-EM algorithm. The continuous-time image reconstruction (CIR) system is described by nonlinear differential equations with piecewise smooth vector fields by a cyclic switching process. A numerical discretization of the differential equation by using the geometric multiplicative first-order expansion of the nonlinear vector field leads to an exact equivalent iterative formula of the power-based OS-EM. The convergence of nonnegatively constrained solutions to a globally stable equilibrium is guaranteed by the Lyapunov theorem for consistent inverse problems. We illustrate through numerical experiments that the convergence characteristics of the continuous system have the highest quality compared with that of discretization methods. We clarify how important the discretization method approximates the solution of the CIR to design a better IIR method.