arXiv subjects

Samuli Siltanen

Publications and source records attributed to Samuli Siltanen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Random tree Besov priors -- Towards fractal imaging

We propose alternatives to Bayesian a priori distributions that are frequently used in the study of inverse problems. Our aim is to construct priors that have similar good edge-preserving properties as total variation or Mumford-Shah priors but correspond to well defined infinite-dimensional random variables, and can be approximated by finite-dimensional random variables. We introduce a new wavelet-based model, where the non zero coefficient are chosen in a systematic way so that prior draws have certain fractal behaviour. We show that realisations of this new prior take values in some Besov spaces and have singularities only on a small set $τ$ that has a certain Hausdorff dimension. We also introduce an efficient algorithm for calculating the MAP estimator, arising from the the new prior, in denoising problem.

math.ST↗

arXiv2020

Fuel rod classification from Passive Gamma Emission Tomography (PGET) of spent nuclear fuel assemblies

Safeguarding the disposal of spent nuclear fuel in a geological repository needs an effective, efficient, reliable and robust non-destructive assay (NDA) system to ensure the integrity of the fuel prior to disposal. In the context of the Finnish geological repository, Passive Gamma Emission Tomography (PGET) will be a part of such an NDA system. We report here on the results of PGET measurements at the Finnish nuclear power plants during the years 2017-2020. Gamma activity profiles are recorded from all angles by rotating the detector arrays around the fuel assembly that has been inserted into the center of the torus. Image reconstruction from the resulting tomographic data is defined as a constrained minimization problem with a data fidelity term and regularization terms. The activity and attenuation maps, as well as detector sensitivity corrections, are the variables in the minimization process. The regularization terms ensure that prior information on the (possible) locations of fuel rods and their diameter are taken into account. Fuel rod classification, the main purpose of the PGET method, is based on the difference of the activity of a fuel rod from its immediate neighbors, taking into account its distance from the assembly center. The classification is carried out by a support vector machine. We report on the results for ten different fuel types with burnups between 5.72 and 55.0 GWd/tU, cooling times between 1.87 and 34.6 years and initial enrichments between 1.9 and 4.4%. For all fuel assemblies measured, missing fuel rods, partial fuel rods and water channels were correctly classified. Burnable absorber fuel rods were classified as fuel rods. On rare occasions, a fuel rod that is present was falsely classified as missing. We conclude that the combination of the PGET device and our image reconstruction method provides a reliable base for fuel rod classification.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2020

Classification of stroke using Neural Networks in Electrical Impedance Tomography

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is an emerging non-invasive medical imaging modality. It is based on feeding electrical currents into the patient, measuring the resulting voltages at the skin, and recovering the internal conductivity distribution. The mathematical task of EIT image reconstruction is a nonlinear and ill-posed inverse problem. Therefore any EIT image reconstruction method needs to be regularized, typically resulting in blurred images. One promising application is stroke-EIT, or classification of stroke into either ischemic or hemorrhagic. Ischemic stroke involves a blood clot, preventing blood flow to a part of the brain causing a low-conductivity region. Hemorrhagic stroke means bleeding in the brain causing a high-conductivity region. In both cases the symptoms are identical, so a cost-effective and portable classification device is needed. Typical EIT are not optimal for stroke-EIT because of blurriness. This paper explores the possibilities of machine learning in improving the classification results. Two paradigms are compared: (a) learning from the EIT data, that is Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DN) maps and (b) extracting robust features from data and learning from them. The features of choice are Virtual Hybrid Edge Detection (VHED) functions [Greenleaf {\it et al.}, Analysis \& PDE 11, 2018] that have a geometric interpretation and whose computation from EIT data does not involve calculating a full image of the conductivity. We report the measures of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the networks trained with EIT data and VHED functions separately. Computational evidence based on simulated noisy EIT data suggests that the regularized grey-box paradigm (b) leads to significantly better classification results than the black-box paradigm (a).

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

Deep neural networks for inverse problems with pseudodifferential operators: an application to limited-angle tomography

We propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN), called $Ψ$DONet, designed for learning pseudodifferential operators ($Ψ$DOs) in the context of linear inverse problems. Our starting point is the Iterative Soft Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA), a well-known algorithm to solve sparsity-promoting minimization problems. We show that, under rather general assumptions on the forward operator, the unfolded iterations of ISTA can be interpreted as the successive layers of a CNN, which in turn provides fairly general network architectures that, for a specific choice of the parameters involved, allow to reproduce ISTA, or a perturbation of ISTA for which we can bound the coefficients of the filters. Our case study is the limited-angle X-ray transform and its application to limited-angle computed tomography (LA-CT). In particular, we prove that, in the case of LA-CT, the operations of upscaling, downscaling and convolution, which characterize our $Ψ$DONet and most deep learning schemes, can be exactly determined by combining the convolutional nature of the limited angle X-ray transform and basic properties defining an orthogonal wavelet system. We test two different implementations of $Ψ$DONet on simulated data from limited-angle geometry, generated from the ellipse data set. Both implementations provide equally good and noteworthy preliminary results, showing the potential of the approach we propose and paving the way to applying the same idea to other convolutional operators which are $Ψ$DOs or Fourier integral operators.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Sparse dynamic tomography. A shearlet-based approach for iodine perfusion in plant stems

In this paper we propose a motion-aware variational approach to reconstruct moving objects from sparse dynamic data. The motivation of this work stems from X-ray imaging of plants perfused with a liquid contrast agent, aimed at increasing the contrast of the images and studying the phloem transport in plants over time. The key idea of our approach is to deploy 3D shearlets as a space-temporal prior, treating time as the third dimension. The rationale behind this model is that a continuous evolution of a cartoon-like object is well suited for the use of 3D shearlets. We provide a basic mathematical analysis of the variational model for the image reconstruction. The numerical minimization is carried out with primal-dual scheme coupled with an automated choice of regularization parameter. We test our model on different measurement setups: a simulated phantom especially designed to resemble a plant stem, with spreading points to simulate a spreading contrast agent; a measured agarose gel phantom to demonstrate iodide diffusion and geometry prior to imaging living sample; a measured living tree grown \textit{in vitro} and perfused with a liquid sugar-iodine-mix. The results, compared against a 2D static model, show that our approach provides reconstructions that capture well the time dynamic of the contrast agent onset and are encouraging to develop microCT as a tool to study phloem transport using iodine tracer.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

Joint Reconstruction in Low Dose Multi-Energy CT

Multi-energy CT takes advantage of the non-linearly varying attenuation properties of elemental media with respect to energy, enabling more precise material identification than single-energy CT. The increased precision comes with the cost of a higher radiation dose. A straightforward way to lower the dose is to reduce the number of projections per energy, but this makes tomographic reconstruction more ill-posed. In this paper, we propose how this problem can be overcome with a combination of a regularization method that promotes structural similarity between images at different energies and a suitably selected low-dose data acquisition protocol using non-overlapping projections. The performance of various joint regularization models is assessed with both simulated and experimental data, using the novel low-dose data acquisition protocol. Three of the models are well-established, namely the joint total variation, the linear parallel level sets and the spectral smoothness promoting regularization models. Furthermore, one new joint regularization model is introduced for multi-energy CT: a regularization based on the structure function from the structural similarity index. The findings show that joint regularization outperforms individual channel-by-channel reconstruction. Furthermore, the proposed combination of joint reconstruction and non-overlapping projection geometry enables significant reduction of radiation dose.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2019

Simultaneous Reconstruction of Emission and Attenuation in Passive Gamma Emission Tomography of Spent Nuclear Fuel

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has recently approved passive gamma emission tomography (PGET) as a method for inspecting spent nuclear fuel assemblies (SFAs), an important aspect of international nuclear safeguards which aim at preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The PGET instrument is essentially a single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) system that allows the reconstruction of axial cross-sections of the emission map of the SFA. The fuel material heavily self-attenuates its gamma-ray emissions, so that correctly accounting for the attenuation is a critical factor in producing accurate images. Due to the nature of the inspections, it is desirable to use as little a priori information as possible about the fuel, including the attenuation map, in the reconstruction process. Current reconstruction methods either do not correct for attenuation, assume a uniform attenuation throughout the fuel assembly, or assume an attenuation map based on an initial filtered back projection (FBP) reconstruction. Here, we propose a method to simultaneously reconstruct the emission and attenuation maps by formulating the reconstruction as a constrained minimization problem with a least squares data fidelity term and regularization terms. Using simulated data, we compare the proposed method to FBP, showing that our approach produces significantly better reconstructions by various numerical metrics and a much better classification of spent, missing, and fresh fuel rods.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2018

Nachman's reconstruction for the Calderon problem with discontinuous conductivities

We show that Nachman's integral equations for the Calderón problem, derived for conductivities in $W^{2,p}(Ω)$, still hold for $L^\infty$ conductivities which are $1$ in a neighborhood of the boundary. We also prove convergence of scattering transforms for smooth approximations to the scattering transform of $L^\infty$ conductivities. We rely on Astala-Päivärinta's formulation of the Calderón problem for a framework in which these convergence results make sense.

math.AP↗

arXiv2018

Tomographic X-ray data of 3D cross phantom

This is the documentation of the tomographic X-ray data of cross phantom made available at this https URL The data can be freely used for scientific purposes with appropriate references to the data and to this document in arxiv.org. The data set consists of (1) the X-ray sinogram with 16 or 30 time frames (depending on theresolution) of 2D slices of the phantom and (2) the corresponding static and dynamic measurement matrices modeling the linear operation of the X-ray transform. Each of these sinograms was obtained from a measured 360-projection fan-beam sinogram by down-sampling and taking logarithms. The original (measured) sinogram is also provided in its original form and resolution.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2018

Revealing cracks inside conductive bodies by electric surface measurements

An algorithm is introduced for using electrical surface measurements to detect and monitor cracks inside a two-dimensional conductive body. The technique is based on transforming the probing functions of the classical enclosure method by the Kelvin transform. The transform makes it possible to use virtual discs for probing the interior of the body using electric measurements performed on a flat surface. Theoretical results are presented to enable probing of the full domain to create a profile indicating cracks in the domain. Feasibility of the method is demonstrated with a simulated model of attaching metal sheets together by resistance spot welding.

math.AP↗

arXiv2018

Undersampled dynamic X-ray tomography with dimension reduction Kalman filter

In this paper, we consider prior-based dimension reduction Kalman filter for undersampled dynamic X-ray tomography. With this method, the X-ray reconstructions are parameterized by a low-dimensional basis. Thus, the proposed method is a) computationally very light; and b) extremely robust as all the computations can be done explicitly. With real and simulated measurement data, we show that the method provides accurate reconstructions even with very limited number of angular directions.

stat.CO↗

arXiv2018

An automatic regularization method: An application for 3D X-ray micro-CT reconstruction using sparse data

X-ray tomography is a reliable tool for determining the inner structure of 3D object with penetrating X-rays. However, traditional reconstruction methods such as FDK require dense angular sampling in the data acquisition phase leading to long measurement times, especially in X-ray micro-tomography to obtain high resolution scans. Acquiring less data using greater angular steps is an obvious way for speeding up the process and avoiding the need to save huge data sets available memory. However, computing 3D reconstruction from such a sparsely sampled dataset is very sensitive to measurement noise and modelling errors. An automatic regularization method is proposed for robust reconstruction, based on enforcing sparsity in the three-dimensional shearlet transform domain. The inputs of the algorithm are the projection data and {\it a priori} known expected degree of sparsity, denoted $0<{\mathcal C}_{pr}\leq 1$. The number ${\mathcal C}_{pr}$ can be calibrated from a few dense-angle reconstructions and fixed. Human subchondral bone samples were tested and morphometric parameters of the bone reconstructions were then analyzed using standard metrics. The proposed method is shown to outperform the baseline algorithm (FDK) in the case of sparsely collected data. The number of X-ray projections can be reduced up to 10\% of the total amount while retaining the quality of the reconstruction images and of the morphometric paramaters.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2018

Tomographic X-ray data of 3D emoji

This is the documentation of the tomographic X-ray data of emoji phantom made available at https://zenodo.org/record/1183532#.WpA35Y5rIy1. The data can be freely used for scientific purposes with appropriate references to the data and to this document in arxiv.org. The data set consists of (1) the X-ray sinogram of a single 2D slice of 33 emoji faces (contains 15 different emoji faces) made by small squared ceramic stones and (2) the corresponding static and dynamic measurement matrices modeling the linear operation of the X-ray transform. Each of these sinograms was obtained from a measured 60-projection fan-beam sinogram by down-sampling and taking logarithms. The original (measured) sinogram is also provided in its original form and resolution. The original (measured) sinogram is also provided in its original form and resolution.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2017

Propagation and recovery of singularities in the inverse conductivity problem

The ill-posedness of Calderón's inverse conductivity problem, responsible for the poor spatial resolution of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), has been an impetus for the development of hybrid imaging techniques, which compensate for this lack of resolution by coupling with a second type of physical wave, typically modeled by a hyperbolic PDE. Here we show how, using EIT data alone, to efficiently detect interior jumps and other singularities of the conductivity. Analysis of the complex geometrical optics solutions of Astala and Päivärinta [\emph{Ann. Math.}, {\bf 163} (2006)] in 2D makes it possible to exploit an underlying complex principal type structure of the problem. We show that the leading term in a Neumann series is an invertible nonlinear generalized Radon transform of the conductivity. The wave front set of all higher-order terms can be characterized, and, under a prior, some are smoother than the leading term. Numerics indicate that this approach effectively detects inclusions within inclusions via EIT.

math.AP↗

arXiv2017

Controlled Wavelet Domain Sparsity in X-ray Tomography

Tomographic reconstruction is an ill-posed inverse problem that calls for regularization. One possibility is to require sparsity of the unknown in an orthonormal wavelet basis. This in turn can be achieved by variational regularization where the penalty term is the sum of absolute values of wavelet coefficients. Daubechies, Defrise and De Mol (Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 57) showed that the minimizer of the variational regularization functional can be computed iteratively using a soft thresholding operation. Choosing the soft threshold parameter $μ>0$ is analogous to the notoriously difficult problem of picking the optimal regularization parameter in Tikhonov regularization. Here a novel automatic method is introduced for choosing $μ$, based on a control algorithm driving the sparsity of the reconstruction to an {\it a priori} known ratio of nonzero versus zero wavelet coefficients in the unknown function.

math.NA↗

arXiv2017

Tomographic X-ray data of carved cheese

This is the documentation of the tomographic X-ray data of a carved cheese slice. Data are available at www.fips.fi/dataset.php, and can be freely used for scientific purposes with appropriate references to them, and to this document in http://arxiv.org/. The data set consists of (1) the X-ray sinogram of a single 2D slice of the cheese slice with three different resolutions and (2) the corresponding measurement matrices modeling the linear operation of the X-ray transform. Each of these sinograms was obtained from a measured 360-projection fan-beam sinogram by down-sampling and taking logarithms. The original (measured) sinogram is also provided in its original form and resolution.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2017

A Variational Reconstruction Method for Undersampled Dynamic X-ray Tomography based on Physical Motion Models

In this paper we study the reconstruction of moving object densities from undersampled dynamic X-ray tomography in two dimensions. A particular motivation of this study is to use realistic measurement protocols for practical applications, i.e. we do not assume to have a full Radon transform in each time step, but only projections in few angular directions. This restriction enforces a space-time reconstruction, which we perform by incorporating physical motion models and regularization of motion vectors in a variational framework. The methodology of optical flow, which is one of the most common methods to estimate motion between two images, is utilized to formulate a joint variational model for reconstruction and motion estimation. We provide a basic mathematical analysis of the forward model and the variational model for the image reconstruction. Moreover, we discuss the efficient numerical minimization based on alternating minimizations between images and motion vectors. A variety of results are presented for simulated and real measurement data with different sampling strategy. A key observation is that random sampling combined with our model allows reconstructions of similar amount of measurements and quality as a single static reconstruction.

math.NA↗

arXiv2017

Direct inversion from partial-boundary data in electrical impedance tomography

In Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) one wants to image the conductivity distribution of a body from current and voltage measurements carried out on its boundary. In this paper we consider the underlying mathematical model, the inverse conductivity problem, in two dimensions and under the realistic assumption that only a part of the boundary is accessible to measurements. In this framework our data are modeled as a partial Neumann-to-Dirichlet map (ND map). We compare this data to the full-boundary ND map and prove that the error depends linearly on the size of the missing part of the boundary. The same linear dependence is further proved for the difference of the reconstructed conductivities -- from partial and full boundary data. The reconstruction is based on a truncated and linearized D-bar method. Auxiliary results include an extrapolation method to obtain the full-boundary data from the measured one, an approximation of the complex geometrical optics solutions computed directly from the ND map as well as an approximate scattering transform for reconstructing the conductivity. Numerical verification of the convergence results and reconstructions are presented for simulated test cases.

math.NA↗