Fuzzy-rule-based image reconstruction for positron emission tomography

Graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated particle filter framework for positron emission tomography image reconstruction

As a consequence of the random nature of photon emissions and detections, the data collected by a positron emission tomography (PET) imaging system can be shown to be Poisson distributed. Meanwhile, there have been considerable efforts within the tracer kinetic modeling communities aimed at establishing the relationship between the PET data and physiological parameters that affect the uptake and metabolism of the tracer. Both statistical and physiological models are important to PET reconstruction. The majority of previous efforts are based on simplified, nonphysical mathematical expression, such as Poisson modeling of the measured data, which is, on the whole, completed without consideration of the underlying physiology. In this paper, we proposed a graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated reconstruction strategy that can take both statistical model and physiological model into consideration with the aid of state-space evolution equations. The proposed strategy formulates the organ activity distribution through tracer kinetics models and the photon-counting measurements through observation equations, thus making it possible to unify these two constraints into a general framework. In order to accelerate reconstruction, GPU-based parallel computing is introduced. Experiments of Zubal-thorax-phantom data, Monte Carlo simulated phantom data, and real phantom data show the power of the method. Furthermore, thanks to the computing power of the GPU, the reconstruction time is practical for clinical application.

Fuzzy logic and maximum a posteriori-based image restoration for confocal microscopy

We propose a maximum a posteriori image restoration approach to 3D confocal microscopy. The image field is suitably modeled as a Markov random field, resulting in a Gibbs distributed image. A fuzzy-logic-based potential is employed in the Gibbs prior. Unlike other potentials, the fuzzy potential distinguishes intensity variation due to genuine edges and noise. The proposed approach has generated artifact-free restored confocal microscopy images.

Image reconstruction for positron emission tomography using fuzzy nonlinear anisotropic diffusion penalty

Iterative algorithms such as maximum likelihood-expectation maximization (ML-EM) become the standard for the reconstruction in emission computed tomography. However, such algorithms are sensitive to noise artifacts so that the reconstruction begins to degrade when the number of iterations reaches a certain value. In this paper, we have investigated a new iterative algorithm for penalized-likelihood image reconstruction that uses the fuzzy nonlinear anisotropic diffusion (AD) as a penalty function. The proposed algorithm does not suffer from the same problem as that of ML-EM algorithm, and it converges to a low noisy solution even if the iteration number is high. The fuzzy reasoning instead of a nonnegative monotonically decreasing function was used to calculate the diffusion coefficients which control the whole diffusion. Thus, the diffusion strength is controlled by fuzzy rules expressed in a linguistic form. The proposed method makes use of the advantages of fuzzy set theory in dealing with uncertain problems and nonlinear AD techniques in removing the noise as well as preserving the edges. Quantitative analysis shows that the proposed reconstruction algorithm is suitable to produce better reconstructed images when compared with ML-EM, ordered subsets EM (OS-EM), Gaussian-MAP, MRP, TV-EM reconstructed images.

Filter for biomedical imaging and image processing

Image filtering techniques have numerous potential applications in biomedical imaging and image processing. The design of filters largely depends on the a priori, knowledge about the type of noise corrupting the image. This makes the standard filters application specific. Widely used filters such as average, Gaussian, and Wiener reduce noisy artifacts by smoothing. However, this operation normally results in smoothing of the edges as well. On the other hand, sharpening filters enhance the high-frequency details, making the image nonsmooth. An integrated general approach to design a finite impulse response filter based on Hebbian learning is proposed for optimal image filtering. This algorithm exploits the interpixel correlation by updating the filter coefficients using Hebbian learning. The algorithm is made iterative for achieving efficient learning from the neighborhood pixels. This algorithm performs optimal smoothing of the noisy image by preserving high-frequency as well as low-frequency features. Evaluation results show that the proposed finite impulse response filter is robust under various noise distributions such as Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and speckle noise. Furthermore, the proposed approach does not require any a priori knowledge about the type of noise. The number of unknown parameters is few, and most of these parameters are adaptively obtained from the processed image. The proposed filter is successfully applied for image reconstruction in a positron emission tomography imaging modality. The images reconstructed by the proposed algorithm are found to be superior in quality compared with those reconstructed by existing PET image reconstruction methodologies.