Experimental Investigation of Angular Stackgram Filtering for Noise Reduction of SPECT Projection Data: Study with Linear and Nonlinear Filters

We discuss data filtering prior to image reconstruction. For this kind of filtering, the radial direction of the sinogram is routinely employed. Recently, we have introduced an alternative approach to sinogram data processing, exploiting the angular information in a novel way. This new stackgram rep...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Antti P. Happonen, Matti O. Koskinen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2007-01-01
Series:International Journal of Biomedical Imaging
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2007/38516
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We discuss data filtering prior to image reconstruction. For this kind of filtering, the radial direction of the sinogram is routinely employed. Recently, we have introduced an alternative approach to sinogram data processing, exploiting the angular information in a novel way. This new stackgram representation can be regarded as an intermediate form of the sinogram and image domains. In this experimental study, we compare the radial sinogram and angular stackgram filtering methods using physical SPECT phantoms. Our study is carried out by employing simple linear and nonlinear filters with ten different Gaussian kernels, in order to provide a comparable investigation. According to our results, angular stackgram filtering with the nonlinear filters provides the best resolution-noise tradeoff of the compared methods. Besides, stackgram filtering with these filters seems to preserve the resolution in an exceptional way. Visually, noise in the reconstructed images after stackgram filtering appears more “powdery” in comparison with radial sinogram filtering.
ISSN:1687-4188
1687-4196