Noise reduction for low-dose X-ray computed tomography with fuzzy filter

Low-dose CT imaging has been particularly used in modern medical practice for its advantage on reducing the radiation dose to patients. However, reconstructed images will distinctly degenerate along with the decrease of the radiation dose. A resolution is to deal with the noisy projection space by an effective filter. This study was performed to address this problem and a fuzzy-median filter was proposed in this paper according to the properties of the noise of low-dose CT images. Reconstructed images by FBP were acquired from the previous noisy sinogram filtered by different filters for comparison. This fuzzy-median filter in fact is a spatially variant one that can solve the streak artifacts. And simulations also indicated that this spatially variant filter could suppress noise and obviously decrease streak artifacts in reconstructed images.