Wavelet based filtering in nuclear medicine

Nuclear medicine imaging utilises the nuclear properties of radioactive nuclides to make diagnostic evaluation of the anatomic and physiologic condition of the body. In contrast to other imaging techniques which are based upon anatomy, it permits one to gather medical information that may be otherwise unavailable, require surgery or necessitate more expensive diagnosis tests. One of the major sources of error in nuclear medicine imaging is Poisson noise which hinders image analysis and interpretation. This paper introduces a wavelet based Poisson noise filtering procedure and assesses its performance.