Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 138581, 14 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/138581
Research Article

Reducing Noises and Artifacts Simultaneously of Low-Dosed X-Ray Computed Tomography Using Bilateral Filter Weighted by Gaussian Filtered Sinogram

1School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
2School of Computer Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu 610101, China
3Institute of Medical Information and Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, China

Received 2 February 2012; Accepted 2 March 2012

Academic Editor: Ming Li

Copyright © 2012 Shaoxiang Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Existing sinogram restoration methods cannot handle noises and nonstationary artifacts simultaneously. Although bilateral filter provides an efficient way to preserve image details while denoising, its performance in sinogram restoration for low-dosed X-ray computed tomography (LDCT) is unsatisfied. The main reason for this situation is that the range filter of the bilateral filter measures similarity by sinogram values, which are polluted seriously by noises and nonstationary artifacts of LDCT. In this paper, we propose a simple method to obtain satisfied restoration results for sinogram of LDCT. That is, the range filter weighs the similarity by Gaussian smoothed sinogram. Since smoothed sinogram can reduce the influence of both noises and nonstationary artifacts for similarity measurement greatly, our new method can provide more satisfied denoising results for sinogram restoration of LDCT. Experimental results show that our method has good visual quality and can preserve anatomy details in sinogram restoration even in both noises and non-stationary artifacts.