Denoising of B{sub 1}{sup +} field maps for noise-robust image reconstruction in electrical properties tomography
Purpose: To validate the use of adaptive nonlinear filters in reconstructing conductivity and permittivity images from the noisy B{sub 1}{sup +} maps in electrical properties tomography (EPT). Methods: In EPT, electrical property images are computed by taking Laplacian of the B{sub 1}{sup +} maps. To mitigate the noise amplification in computing the Laplacian, the authors applied adaptive nonlinear denoising filters to the measured complex B{sub 1}{sup +} maps. After the denoising process, they computed the Laplacian by central differences. They performed EPT experiments on phantoms and a human brain at 3 T along with corresponding EPT simulations on finite-difference time-domain models. They evaluated the EPT images comparing them with the ones obtained by previous EPT reconstruction methods. Results: In both the EPT simulations and experiments, the nonlinear filtering greatly improved the EPT image quality when evaluated in terms of the mean and standard deviation of the electrical property values at the regions of interest. The proposed method also improved the overall similarity between the reconstructed conductivity images and the true shapes of the conductivity distribution. Conclusions: The nonlinear denoising enabled us to obtain better-quality EPT images of the phantoms and the human brain at 3 T.
- OSTI ID:
- 22409493
- Journal Information:
- Medical Physics, Vol. 41, Issue 10; Other Information: (c) 2014 American Association of Physicists in Medicine; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-2405
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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