切伦科夫荧光成像因具有临床上广泛可用的放射性核素探针而成为近年来光学分子影像领域的研究热点,但放射性核素在衰变过程中产生的大量高能射线会造成采集到的切伦科夫荧光图像上存在大量脉冲噪声,严重影响基于切伦科夫荧光图像的定量分析和后续的三维重建等。为了尽可能降低上述噪声,提出了一种结合模糊局部信息C-均值聚类算法和整体变分模型的切伦科夫荧光图像去噪算法。数值仿真、物理仿体以及真实动物实验结果表明:与现阶段广泛使用的中值滤波算法相比,所提去噪算法能够在有效去除噪声的同时保留切伦科夫荧光光源部位的形状细节。

With widely availed clinically used radionuclides, Cerenkov luminescence imaging (CLI) has become a potential tool in the field of optical molecular imaging. However, the impulse noises introduced by high-energy gamma rays that are generated during the decay of radionuclide reduce the image quality significantly, which affects the accuracy of quantitative analysis, as well as the three-dimensional reconstruction. In this work, a novel denoising framework based on fuzzy clustering and curvature-driven diffusion (CDD) is proposed to remove this kind of impulse noises. To improve the accuracy, the Fuzzy Local Information C-Means algorithm, where spatial information is evolved, is used. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework systematically with a series of experiments, and the corresponding results demonstrate a better denoising effect than those from the commonly used median filter method. We hope this work may provide a useful data pre-processing tool for CLI and its following studies.