In medical diagnosis, cone beam CT increases the dose absorbed by a patient. However, the radiographic noise (such as quantum noise) in a CT image increases when radiation exposure is reduced. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the CT image degraded by the quantum mottle based on 2-D wavelet transform modulus sum (WTMS). The noise and regular parts of an image can be observed by tracing the evolution of its 2-D WTMS across scales. Our experimental results show that most of the quantum mottle in the 2-D projections is removed by the proposed method and the edges preserved well. We investigate the relation between the number of X-ray photons and the quality of the denoised images. The result shows the possibility that a patient's dose can be reduced about 10% with the same visual quality by our method.

To improve the CT image degraded by radiographic noise (such as quantum mottle), we propose a method based on the wavelet transform modulus sum (WTMS). The noise and regular parts of a signal can be observed by tracing the evolution of its WTMS across scales. Our results show that most of the quantum mottle in the projections of Shepp-Logan phantom has been removed by the proposed method with the supposed cranium well preserved. The denoised CT images show good signal to noise ratio in the region of interest. We also have investigated the relation between the number of X-ray photons and the quality of images reconstructed from denoised projections. From experimental results, this method shows the possibility to reduce a patient's dose about 1/10 with the same visual quality.