Noise reduction in heart movies by motion-compensated filtering

The present paper investigates motion compensated temporal filtering for noise removal in medical image sequences. A first order recursive filter that adapts automatically to the quality of motion estimation is tested, and two extensions of the algorithm are suggested. One is a combination with a efficient, edge preserving spatial filter, and the other an extension of second order recursive filtering with fa one frame delayed output. The latter is achieved without demands for extra motion estimates. The extensions give improvements in output signal-to-noise ratio, both if used separately, and more so if used in combination.