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Spatiotemporal processing of gated cardiac SPECT images using deformable mesh modeling
Author(s) -
Brankov Jovan G.,
Yang Yongyi,
Wernick Miles N.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.2013027
Subject(s) - smoothing , artificial intelligence , feature (linguistics) , computer vision , partial volume , computer science , artifact (error) , noise (video) , single photon emission computed tomography , image processing , gated spect , cardiac imaging , noise reduction , reduction (mathematics) , pattern recognition (psychology) , algorithm , image (mathematics) , radiology , medicine , mathematics , ejection fraction , heart failure , philosophy , linguistics , geometry
In this paper we present a spatiotemporal processing approach, based on deformable mesh modeling, for noise reduction in gated cardiac single‐photon emission computed tomography images. Because of the partial volume effect (PVE), clinical cardiac‐gated perfusion images exhibit a phenomenon known as brightening—the myocardium appears to become brighter as the heart wall thickens. Although brightening is an artifact, it serves as an important diagnostic feature for assessment of wall thickening in clinical practice. Our proposed processing algorithm aims to preserve this important diagnostic feature while reducing the noise level in the images. The proposed algorithm is based on the use of a deformable mesh for modeling the cardiac motion in a gated cardiac sequence, based on which the images are processed by smoothing along space‐time trajectories of object points while taking into account the PVE. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can yield significantly more‐accurate results than several existing methods.