Optical Coherence Tomography heart tube image denoising based on contourlet transform

Optical Coherence Tomography(OCT) gradually becomes a very important imaging technology in the Biomedical field for its noninvasive, nondestructive and real-time properties. However, the interpretation and application of the OCT images are limited by the ubiquitous noise. In this paper, a denoising algorithm based on contourlet transform for the OCT heart tube image is proposed. A bivariate function is constructed to model the joint probability density function (pdt) of the coefficient and its cousin in contourlet domain. A bivariate shrinkage function is deduced to denoise the image by the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. Three metrics, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and equivalent number of look (ENL), are used to evaluate the denoised image using the proposed algorithm. The results show that the signal-to-noise ratio is improved while the edges of object are preserved by the proposed algorithm. Systemic comparisons with other conventional algorithms, such as mean filter, median filter, RKT filter, Lee filter, as well as bivariate shrinkage function for wavelet-based algorithm are conducted. The advantage of the proposed algorithm over these methods is illustrated.