Image Quality Improvement in Computed Tomography by Using Anisotropic 2-Dimensional Diffusion Based Filter

Abstract

The purpose of this study was tried to remove the noise and improve the spatial resolution in the computed tomography (CT) by using anisotropic 2-dimensional (2D) diffusion based filter. We used 4-channel multi-detector CT and american association of physicists in medicine (AAPM) phantom was used for CT performance evaluation to evaluate the image quality. X-ray irradiation conditions for image acquisition was fixed at 120 kVp, 100 mAs and scanned 10 mm axis with ultra-high resolution. The improvement of anisotropic 2D diffusion filtering that we suggested firstly, increase the contrast of the image by using histogram stretching to the original image for 0.4%, and multiplying the individual pixels by 1.2 weight value, and applying the anisotropic diffusion filtering. As a result, we could distinguished five holes until 0.75 mm in the original image but, five holes until 0.40 mm in the image with improved anisotropic diffusion filter. The noise of the original image was 46.0, the noise of the image with improved anisotropic 2D diffusion filter was decreased to 33.5(27.2%). In conclusion improved anisotropic 2D diffusion filter that we proposed could remove the noise of the CT image and improve the spatial resolution.