Comparison of Different Denoising Filters in Myocardial Perfusion Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) Images

Document Type : Original Article(s)

Authors

1 MSc Student, Department of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran

3 Associate Professor, Department of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

Background: Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging is widely implemented in nuclear medicine for detecting coronary artery diseases. To increase the accuracy of the diagnosis, it is necessary to improve the quality of the SPECT images that can be degraded by noise. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of using different filters such as Butterworth, Gaussian, Wiener with kernel sizes 3×3 and 5×5, and Median Modified Wiener Filters (MMWF with kernel sizes 3×3 and 5×5 to improve the quality of myocardial perfusion SPECT images with 99mTc-MIBI.
Methods: A Siemens Symbia T2 dual head SPECT/CT scanner equipped with a low-energy and high-resolution collimator (LEHR) was used for collecting data for this cross-sectional-applied study. The noise ratio (SNR), peak to noise ratio (PSNR) and contrast to noise ratio (CNR) were the indices used to asses the quality of the myocardial perfusion SPECT images of 30 patients after the filters mentioned above have been applied to the images.
Findings: Wiener filter with kernel size of 5×5 4.90 ± 0.69 and 2.65 ± 0.57 were found be the highest SNR and CNR indices respectively. However, it had the lowest PSNR in the range of 29.93 ± 3.13 (dB). In addition, the highest PSNR values were associated with the Gaussian filter as 50.09 ± 10.63 (dB).
Conclusion: The results of this study show that the wiener filter of kernel size of 5×5 outperformed the others to improve the quality of myocardial perfusion SPECT images used in this study.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Isfahan Medical School
Volume 40, Issue 683
3rd Week, October
October 2022
Pages 624-631

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