<title>Multiscale image restoration for photon imaging systems</title>

Abstract

Nuclear medicine imaging is a widely used commercial imaging modality which relies on photon detection as the basis of image formation. As a diagnosis tool, it is unique in that it documents organ function and structure. It is a way to gather information that may be otherwise unavailable or require surgery. Practical limitations on imaging time and the amount of activity that can be administered safely to patients are serious impediments to substantial further improvements in nuclear medicine imaging. Hence, improvements of image quality via optimized image processing represent a significant opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art int his field. We present in this paper a new multiscale image restoration method that is concerned with eliminating one of the major sources of error in nuclear medicine imaging, namely Poisson noise, which degrades images in both quantitative and qualitative senses and hinders image analysis and interpretation. The paper then quantitatively evaluates the performances of the proposed method.