DQS advisor: A visual interface to balance dose, quality and reconstruction speed in iterative CT

Low-dose CT has recently shown much progress in its mission to deliver clinically-useful results with reduced radiation imposed on patients. However, for many of the proposed reconstruction algorithms there is still no quantitative link between the settings of the various parameters and the corresponding reconstruction image quality and reconstruction time. As a solution, we propose to combine automatic optimization with human interaction. We developed an interactive visual parameter space navigation interface which assists users in the selection of data acquisition and iterative CT algorithm parameter settings and allows them to intuitively decide among trade-offs. The optimization component is based on our previous parameter optimization framework. We now focus on the visual interface and conduct a study across different data acquisition settings in terms of X-ray tube current and number of projections. The user interface presents the performance data as color-mapped 2D scatter plots and it also provides a gallery feature that allows a qualitative comparison of possible reconstruction results. Our system is embedded into a webpage and can be accessed via a web browser from anywhere and any common computer platform. Further efforts focus on the scalability of our approach, in order to make it applicable to realistic application scenarios.