Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 391050, 13 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/391050
Research Article

Sinogram Restoration for Low-Dosed X-Ray Computed Tomography Using Fractional-Order Perona-Malik Diffusion

Shaoxiang Hu,1 Zhiwu Liao,2 and Wufan Chen3

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 18 January 2012; Accepted 16 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 integer-order Nonlinear Anisotropic Diffusion (NAD) used in noise suppressing will produce undesirable staircase effect or speckle effect. In this paper, we propose a new scheme, named Fractal-order Perona-Malik Diffusion (FPMD), which replaces the integer-order derivative of the Perona-Malik (PM) Diffusion with the fractional-order derivative using G-L fractional derivative. FPMD, which is a interpolation between integer-order Nonlinear Anisotropic Diffusion (NAD) and fourth-order partial differential equations, provides a more flexible way to balance the noise reducing and anatomical details preserving. Smoothing results for phantoms and real sinograms show that FPMD with suitable parameters can suppress the staircase effects and speckle effects efficiently. In addition, FPMD also has a good performance in visual quality and root mean square errors (RMSE).