Vessel enhancement filtering in three‐dimensional MR angiograms using long‐range signal correlation

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Abstract
Small vessels in three‐dimensional MR angiograms have low visibility in maximum‐intensity projection images because of their low contrast. In a previous study, we had two nonlinear filters that appeared to give significant improvement in small vessel detail. In this paper, we report on a generalization of this filter that allows a more general modeling of the vessels and a more complete suppression of background. One implementation of the general filter gave a vessel mean contrast‐to‐noise ratio that is 2.52 and 3.51 times higher than the vessel mean contrast‐to‐noise ratio obtained using our previously reported maximum‐minimum (max‐min) filter and cross‐ section filter, respectively.