Balda M, Hornegger J, Heismann B (2012)
Publication Type: Journal article, Original article
Publication year: 2012
Original Authors: Balda M., Hornegger J., Heismann B.
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Book Volume: 31
Pages Range: 1228-1239
Journal Issue: 6
The patient dose in computed tomography (CT) imaging is linked to measurement noise. Various noise-reduction techniques have been developed that adapt structure preserving filters like anisotropic diffusion or bilateral filters to CT noise properties. We introduce a structure adaptive sinogram (SAS) filter that incorporates the specific properties of the CT measurement process. It uses a point-based forward projector to generate a local structure representation called ray contribution mask (RCM). The similarities between neighboring RCMs are used in an enhanced variant of the bilateral filtering concept, where the photometric similarity is replaced with the structural similarity. We evaluate the performance in four different scenarios: The robustness against reconstruction artifacts is demonstrated by a scan of a high-resolution-phantom. Without changing the modulation transfer function (MTF) nor introducing artifacts, the SAS filter reduces the noise level by 13.6%. The image sharpness and noise reduction capabilities are visually assessed on in vivo patient scans and quantitatively evaluated on a simulated phantom. Unlike a standard bilateral filter, the SAS filter preserves edge information and high-frequency components of organ textures well. It shows a homogeneous noise reduction behavior throughout the whole frequency range. The last scenario uses a simulated edge phantom to estimate the filter MTF for various contrasts: the noise reduction for the simple edge phantom exceeds 80%. For low contrasts at 55 Hounsfield units (HU), the mid-frequency range is slightly attenuated, at higher contrasts of approximately 100 HU and above, the MTF is fully preserved. © 2012 IEEE.
APA:
Balda, M., Hornegger, J., & Heismann, B. (2012). Ray contribution masks for structure adaptive sinogram filtering. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 31(6), 1228-1239. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TMI.2012.2187213
MLA:
Balda, Michael, Joachim Hornegger, and Björn Heismann. "Ray contribution masks for structure adaptive sinogram filtering." IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 31.6 (2012): 1228-1239.
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