Analysis of 3D Linear and Non-linear Filtering Effects Based on 3D MDCT Medical Images

The risk of X-ray exposure will increase when applying the 3D-CT methods such as MDCT. To decrease this risk it is better to lower the dose-level of X-ray, but it reduces the resolution of obtained image and causes negative effect on imaging diagnosis. We think that 3D-filtering methods will recover the reduction. In order to obtain a better filtered result, 3D linear and non-linear filters are designed and applied to 80%, 60%, 40% and 20%-dose simulated low dose clinical MDCT images of abdomen with a tumor. Direct observation and 3D voxel value profile is extracted to evaluate the filtered results. Experimental results show both the filtering and the evaluating method perform well.