Region-Based Segmentation and Wiener Pilot-Based Novel Amoeba Denoising Scheme for CT Imaging

Computed tomography (CT) is one of the most common and beneficial medical imaging schemes, but the associated high radiation dose injurious to the patient is always a concern. Therefore, postprocessing-based enhancement of a CT reconstructed image acquired using a reduced dose is an active research area. Amoeba- (or spatially variant kernel-) based filtering is a strong candidate scheme for postprocessing of the CT image, which adapts its shape according to the image contents. In the reported research work, the amoeba filtering is customized for postprocessing of CT images acquired at a reduced X-ray dose. The proposed scheme modifies both the pilot image formation and amoeba shaping mechanism of the conventional amoeba implementation. The proposed scheme uses a Wiener filter-based pilot image, while region-based segmentation is used for amoeba shaping instead of the conventional amoeba distance-based approach. The merits of the proposed scheme include being more suitable for CT images because of the similar region-based and symmetric nature of the human body anatomy, image smoothing without compromising on the edge details, and being adaptive in nature and more robust to noise. The performance of the proposed amoeba scheme is compared to the traditional amoeba kernel in the image denoising application for CT images using filtered back projection (FBP) on sparse-view projections. The scheme is supported by computer simulations using fan-beam projections of clinically reconstructed and simulated head CT phantoms. The scheme is tested using multiple image quality matrices, in the presence of additive projection noise. The scheme implementation significantly improves the image quality visually and statistically, providing better contrast and image smoothing without compromising on edge details. Promising results indicate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.