Denoising and deconvolution in nuclear medicine

Nuclear medicine imaging is an excellent diagnostic tool because it does not only show the anatomy of an organ or body part, but also the function of the organ. This additional functional information allows nuclear medicine to diagnose certain diseases much sooner that other medical examinations which provide mainly anatomic information. One of the major sources of error in nuclear medicine images is Poisson noise which hinders image analysis and interpretation. Moreover, we are facing the problem of removing the effect of the observation mechanism from the images. This paper presents a new restoration method where denoising and deconvolution are coupled in a multiresolution frame. The performances are illustrated with phantom images