A nonlinear and non-iterative noise reduction technique for medical images: concept and methods comparison

Filtering is a preliminary process in many medical image processing applications. It is aiming at reducing noise in images. Any post-processing tasks may benefit from the reduction of noise. In this paper, a method for edge-preserving smoothing of 2D and 3D medical images is described. The proposed method uses a narrow spatial window and takes only a single iteration to deinoise an image. It integrates geometric, photometric and local structural similarities to achieve nonlinear noise reduction. We have applied this novel method to medical images and compared its denoising capability with other noise reduction techniques. The experimental results have shown that our method is capable of reducing severe noise, and is an adequate preprocess to improving the quality of segmentation and facilitating the feature extraction process. (C) 2004 CARS and Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved