Marie Anne Richard1, Réjean Lebel1, Jérémie P. Fouquet1, and Martin Lepage1
Positron
emission tomography (PET) images suffer from statistical noise, especially in
short time frames. For applications requiring high temporal resolution, such as
dynamic studies, efficient edge-preserving denoising algorithms such as the
non-local means filter (NLMF) are needed. Because this filter relies on structural
data, coregistered MR images were used to guide the NLMF. This novel method was
compared to conventional PET-guided NLMF and proved superior in terms of
increased contrast-to-background ratio and signal-to-noise ratio in a phantom
model. It also increased small structure resolution in a rat model.
