Use of total variation filters in SPECT medical imaging

Total variation denoising filtering is proposed as an alternative to the Butterworth filter, which is widely used in the reconstruction of SPECT medical images. Its advantages lie in the preservation of the image edges while the noise is removed, as opposed to the blurring that characterizes Butterworth filtered images. However, results show that total variation filtering application to SPECT medical images doesn’t represent an improvement in terms of similarity to the reference image.