A review on CT image noise and its denoising

Abstract

CT imaging is widely used in medical science over the last decades. The process of CT image reconstruction depends on many physical measurements such as radiation dose, software/hardware. Due to statistical uncertainty in all physical measurements in Computed Tomography, the inevitable noise is introduced in CT images. Therefore, edge-preserving denoising methods are required to enhance the quality of CT images. However, there is a tradeoff between noise reduction and the preservation of actual medical relevant contents. Reducing the noise without losing the important features of the image such as edges, corners and other sharp structures, is a challenging task. Nevertheless, various techniques have been presented to suppress the noise from the CT scanned images. Each technique has their own assumptions, merits and limitations. This paper contains a survey of some significant work in the area of CT image denoising. Often, researchers face difficulty to understand the noise in CT images and also to select an appropriate denoising method that is specific to their purpose. Hence, a brief introduction about CT imaging, the characteristics of noise in CT images and the popular methods of CT image denoising are presented here. The merits and drawbacks of CT image denoising methods are also discussed.