Voxel-wise Weighted MR Image Enhancement using an Extended Neighborhood Filter

We present an edge preserving and denoising filter for enhancing the features in images, which contain an ROI having a narrow spatial extent. Typical examples include angiograms, or ROI spatially distributed in multiple locations and contained within an outlying region, such as in multiple-sclerosis. The filtering involves determination of multiplicative weights in the spatial domain using an extended set of neighborhood directions. Equivalently, the filtering operation may be interpreted as a combination of directional filters in the frequency domain, with selective weighting for spatial frequencies contained within each direction. The advantages of the proposed filter in comparison to specialized non-linear filters, which operate on diffusion principle, are illustrated using numerical phantom data. The performance evaluation is carried out on simulated images from BrainWeb database for multiple-sclerosis, acute ischemic stroke using clinically acquired FLAIR images and MR angiograms.