Visual and Quantitative Assessment of a New Anisotropic Diffusion Filter (Statistical Transfer with Optimizing Noise and Edge Sensing) for Positron Emission Tomography

Post-filtering with a Gaussian filter is commonly used to reduce noise in positron emission tomography (PET) images. However, its non-selective smoothing obscures the edges of lesions or organs. We compared the performance of a newly developed anisotropic diffusion filter called “Statistical Transfer with Optimizing Noise and Edge Sensing” (STONES) with that of the Gaussian filter for small lesions on PET images. We selected seven PET/computed...