Dual adaptive statistical approach for quantitative noise reduction in photon-counting medical imaging: application to nuclear medicine images.

Noise reduction in photon-counting images remains challenging, especially at low count levels. We have developed an original procedure which associates two complementary filters using a Wiener-derived approach. This approach combines two statistically adaptive filters into a dual-weighted (DW) filter. The first one, a statistically weighted adaptive (SWA) filter, replaces the central pixel of a sliding window with a statistically weighted sum of its neighbors. The second one, a statistical and heuristic noise extraction (extended) (SHINE-Ext) filter, performs a discrete cosine transformation (DCT) using sliding blocks. Each block is reconstructed using its significant components which are selected using tests derived from multiple linear regression (MLR). The two filters are weighted according to Wiener theory. This approach has been validated using a numerical phantom and a real planar Jaszczak phantom. It has also been illustrated using planar bone scintigraphy and myocardial single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) data. Performances of filters have been tested using mean normalized absolute error (MNAE) between the filtered images and the reference noiseless or high-count images.Results show that the proposed filters quantitatively decrease the MNAE in the images and then increase the signal-to-noise Ratio (SNR). This allows one to work with lower count images. The SHINE-Ext filter is well suited to high-size images and low-variance areas. DW filtering is efficient for low-size images and in high-variance areas. The relative proportion of eliminated noise generally decreases when count level increases. In practice, SHINE filtering alone is recommended when pixel spacing is less than one-quarter of the effective resolution of the system and/or the size of the objects of interest. It can also be used when the practical interest of high frequencies is low. In any case, DW filtering will be preferable.The proposed filters have been applied to nuclear medicine images but can also be used for any other kind of photon-counting images, such as x-ray and fluorescence images.