Spatio-Temporal Multiscale Denoising of Fluoroscopic Sequence.

In the past 20 years, a wide range of complex fluoroscopically guided procedures have shown considerable growth. Biologic effects of the exposure (radiation induced burn, cancer) lead to reduce the dose during the intervention, for the safety of patients and medical staff. However, when the dose is reduced, image quality decreases, with a high level of noise and a very low contrast. Efficient restoration and denoising algorithms should overcome this drawback. We propose a spatio-temporal filter operating in a multi-scales space. This filter relies on a first order, motion compensated, recursive temporal denoising. Temporal high frequency content is first detected and then matched over time to allow for a strong denoising in the temporal axis. We study this filter in the curvelet domain and in the dual-tree complex wavelet domain, and compare those results to state of the art methods. Quantitative and qualitative analysis on both synthetic and real fluoroscopic sequences demonstrate that the proposed filter allows a great dose reduction.