Back to results
US 2008/0175457 A1Published application
Spatially localized noise adaptive smoothing of emission tomography images
AssigneeSiemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc.
InventorCharles C. Watson
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method and system for spatially localized, noise-adaptive smoothing of filtered back-projection (FBP) nuclear images includes smoothing a FBP image on a pixel-by-pixel basis using a shift-invariant kernel such as a Gaussian kernel. The width of the kernel may be varied on a pixel basis, such that the smoothed image contains a constant SNR over the entire image.
Claims22
A method for spatially localized noise-adaptive smoothing of nuclear medicine tomographic images, comprising:
- obtaining a mean value Rαij for each pixel (i,j) of a reconstructed image by reconstructing the corresponding nuclear medicine data using a shift-invariant smoothing kernel of width α;
- obtaining a variance Vαij of each Rαij;
- and
- forming a signal-to-noise ratio image SNRαij from the ratio
- SNR
- α
- ij
- =
- R
- α
- ij
- V
- α
- ij
- .
12 more elements
A system for producing spatially localized noise-adaptive smoothing of nuclear medicine tomographic images, comprising:
- a nuclear medicine tomographic imaging device;
- a processor for receiving data from the image device;
- and
- software executing on the processor, which obtains a mean value Rαij for each pixel (i,j) of a reconstructed image by reconstructing the corresponding nuclear medicine data using a shift-invariant smoothing kernel of width a;
- obtains a variance Vαij of each Rαij;
- and
- forms a signal-to-noise ratio image SNRαij from the ratio
- SNR
- α
- ij
- =
- R
- α
- ij
- V
- α
- ij
- .
15 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.