“…Two choices for the penalty term in the cost function are investigated: a total variation (TV) penalty and a weighted sum of a TV penalty and an ℓ 1 -norm with a wavelet sparsifying transform (Lustig, Donoho & Pauly 2007, Dutta, Ahn, Li, Cherry & Leahy 2012). While TV and other sparsity promoting regularization strategies have been extensively applied for reconstruction problems that explictly or implicitly minimize a penalized least squares (PLS) cost function (Sidky & Pan 2008, Bian, Siewerdsen, Han, Sidky, Prince, Pelizzari & Pan 2010, Gao, Yu, Osher & Wang 2011, Xu, Yang, Tan & Anastasio 2012, Xu, Sidky, Pan, Stampanoni, Modregger & Anastasio 2012, Yang, Wang & Guo 2013), relatively few works have investigated the impact of exploiting such regularization strategies in combination with a statistically weighted data fidelity term in a PWLS framework (Ramani & Fessler 2012, Ma 2011). Computer-simulation and experimental phantom studies are conducted to visually and quantitatively demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed reconstruction methods.…”