Objective: To minimize of the radiation dose of cardiovascular CT angiography (CTA) imaging while preserving the image quality.
Methods: To reduce the radiation dose in CTA imaging, the normal-dose scan induced non-local means (ndiNLM) algorithm was adapted for low-mAs scanned CTA image restoration by using the previous scanned high-quality image.
Results: Qualitative and quantitative evaluations were carried out on both simulated phantom and clinical CTA scans in terms of accuracy and resolution properties. Compared to the original NLM algorithm, the ndiNLM method could achieve noticeable gains in terms of noise-induced artifacts suppression and enhanced structure preservation.
Conclusion: The ndiNLM algorithm is a potential useful technique to reduce the radiation dose in CTA imaging.