Truncated total variation in fractional B-spline wavelet transform for micro-CT image denoising.

BACKGROUND: In medical applications, computed tomography (CT) is widely used to evaluate various sample characteristics. However, image quality of CT reconstruction can be degraded due to artifacts.

OBJECTIVE: To propose and test a truncated total variation (truncation TV) model to solve the problem of large penalties for the total variation (TV) model.

METHODS: In this study, a truncated TV image denoising model in the fractional B-spline wavelet domain is developed to obtain the best solution. The method is validated by the analysis of CT reconstructed images of actual biological Pigeons samples. For this purpose, several indices including the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM) and mean square error (MSE) are used to evaluate the quality of images.

RESULTS: Comparing to the conventional truncated TV model that yields 22.55, 0.688 and 361.17 in PSNR, SSIM and MSE, respectively, using the proposed fractional B-spline-truncated TV model, the computed values of these evaluation indices change to 24.24, 0.898 and 244.98, respectively, indicating substantial reduction of image noise with higher PSNR and SSIM, and lower MSE.

CONCLUSIONS: Study results demonstrate that compared with many classic image denoising methods, the new denoising algorithm proposed in this study can more effectively suppresses the reconstructed CT image artifacts while maintaining the detailed image structure.