Publication date: Jul 11, 2024

This study aimed to acquire an image quality consistent with that of full-dose chest computed tomography (CT) when obtaining low-dose chest CT images and to analyze the effects of block-matching and 3D (BM3D) filters on lung density measurements and noise reduction in lung parenchyma. Using full-dose chest CT images, we evaluated lung density measurements and noise reduction in lung parenchyma images for low-dose chest CT. Three filters (median, Wiener, and the proposed BM3D) were applied to low-dose chest CT images for comparison and analysis with images from full-dose chest CT. To evaluate lung density measurements, we measured CT attenuation at the 15th percentile of the lung CT histogram. The coefficient of variation (COV) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) were used to evaluate the noise level. The 15th percentile of the lung CT histogram showed the smallest difference between full- and low-dose CT when applying the BM3D filter, and the highest difference between full- and low-dose CT without filters (full-dose = – 926. 28 +/- 0. 32, BM3D = – 926. 65 +/- 0. 32, and low-dose = – 959. 43 +/- 0. 95) (p

Semantics

Original Article