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https://doi.org/10.1186/2191-219X-1-23

has been cited by the following article:

• TITLE: Denoising Projection Data with a Robust Adaptive Bilateral Filter in Low-Count SPECT

  AUTHORS: Susumu Nakabayashi, Takashi Chikamatsu, Takao Okamoto, Tatsuro Kaminaga, Norikazu Arai, Shinobu Kumagai, Kenshiro Shiraishi, Takahide Okamoto, Takenori Kobayashi, Jun’ichi Kotoku

  KEYWORDS: Bilateral Filter, Denoising, SPECT, Nuclear Medicine

  JOURNAL NAME: International Journal of Medical Physics, Clinical Engineering and Radiation Oncology, Vol.7 No.3, August 20, 2018

  ABSTRACT: Low-count SPECT images are well known to be smoothed strongly by a Butterworth filter for statistical noise reduction. Reconstructed images have a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial resolution because of the removal of high-frequency signal components. Using the developed robust adaptive bilateral filter (RABF), which was designed as a pre-stage filter of the Butterworth filter, this study was conducted to improve SNR without degrading the spatial resolution for low-count SPECT imaging. The filter can remove noise while preserving spatial resolution. To evaluate the proposed method, we extracted SNR and spatial resolution in a phantom study. We also conducted paired comparison for visual image quality evaluation in a clinical study. Results show that SNR was increased 1.4 times without degrading the spatial resolution. Visual image quality was improved significantly (p