Numerical solution of a nonlinear least squares problem in digital breast tomosynthesis

In digital tomosynthesis imaging, multiple projections of an object are obtained along a small range of different incident angles in order to reconstruct a pseudo-3D representation (i.e., a set of 2D slices) of the object. In this paper we describe some mathematical models for polyenergetic digital breast tomosynthesis image reconstruction that explicitly takes into account various materials composing the object and the polyenergetic nature of the x-ray beam. A polyenergetic model helps to reduce beam hardening artifacts, but the disadvantage is that it requires solving a large-scale nonlinear ill-posed inverse problem. We formulate the image reconstruction process (i.e., the method to solve the ill-posed inverse problem) in a nonlinear least squares framework, and use a Levenberg-Marquardt scheme to solve it. Some implementation details are discussed, and numerical experiments are provided to illustrate the performance of the methods.