Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 902143, 8 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/902143
Research Article

Improving Spatial Adaptivity of Nonlocal Means in Low-Dosed CT Imaging Using Pointwise Fractal Dimension

Xiuqing Zheng,1 Zhiwu Liao,2 Shaoxiang Hu,3 Ming Li,4 and Jiliu Zhou1

1College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, No. 29 Jiuyanqiao Wangjiang Road, Chengdu 610064, Sichuan, China
2School of Computer Science, Sichuan Normal University, No. 1819 Section 2 of Chenglong Road, Chengdu 610101, Sichuan, China
3School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, No. 2006, Xiyuan Ave, West Hi-Tech Zone, Chengdu 611731, Sichuan, China
4School of Information Science and Technology, East China Normal University, No. 500, Dong-Chuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China

Received 25 January 2013; Accepted 6 March 2013

Academic Editor: Shengyong Chen

Copyright © 2013 Xiuqing Zheng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

NLMs is a state-of-art image denoising method; however, it sometimes oversmoothes anatomical features in low-dose CT (LDCT) imaging. In this paper, we propose a simple way to improve the spatial adaptivity (SA) of NLMs using pointwise fractal dimension (PWFD). Unlike existing fractal image dimensions that are computed on the whole images or blocks of images, the new PWFD, named pointwise box-counting dimension (PWBCD), is computed for each image pixel. PWBCD uses a fixed size local window centered at the considered image pixel to fit the different local structures of images. Then based on PWBCD, a new method that uses PWBCD to improve SA of NLMs directly is proposed. That is, PWBCD is combined with the weight of the difference between local comparison windows for NLMs. Smoothing results for test images and real sinograms show that PWBCD-NLMs with well-chosen parameters can preserve anatomical features better while suppressing the noises efficiently. In addition, PWBCD-NLMs also has better performance both in visual quality and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) than NLMs in LDCT imaging.