Title
Noise Reduction in Small-Animal PET Images Using a Multiresolution Transform.
Abstract
In this paper, we address the problem of denoising reconstructed small animal positron emission tomography (PET) images, based on a multiresolution approach which can be implemented with any transform such as contourlet, shearlet, curvelet, and wavelet. The PET images are analyzed and processed in the transform domain by modeling each subband as a set of different regions separated by boundaries. Homogeneous and heterogeneous regions are considered. Each region is independently processed using different filters: a linear estimator for homogeneous regions and a surface polynomial estimator for the heterogeneous region. The boundaries between the different regions are estimated using a modified edge focusing filter. The proposed approach was validated by a series of experiments. Our method achieved an overall reduction of up to 26% in the % STD of the reconstructed image of a small animal NEMA phantom. Additionally, a test on a simulated lesion showed that our method yields better contrast preservation than other state-of-the art techniques used for noise reduction. Thus, the proposed method provides a significant reduction of noise while at the same time preserving contrast and important structures such as lesions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/TMI.2014.2329702
IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging
Keywords
Field
DocType
Image enhancement, multiresolution transform, noise reduction, positron emission tomography (PET)
Noise reduction,Computer vision,Artificial intelligence,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
33
10
0278-0062
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.41
6
Authors
5