An approach for radiation dose reduction in computerized tomography

Abstract

Minimization of radiation dose plays an important role in human wellbeing. Excess of radiation dose leads to cancer. Radiation greatly affects young children less than 10 years of age as their life span is longer. Radiation can be reduced by hardware and/or by software techniques. Hardware methods deal with variation of parameters such as tube voltage, tube current, exposure time, focal distance and filter type. Software techniques include image processing methods. The originally acquired X-ray images may be contaminated with noise due to the fact of instability in the case of sensors, electrical power or X-ray source, that is responsible for the degradation of the image attributes. An enhanced image denoising algorithm has been proposed which decreases Gaussian noise combined with salt and pepper noise that retains most information particulars.