IMAGE ENHANCEMENT USING ANISOTROPIC NOISE FILTERING

A method including receiving data corresponding to an original three-dimensional (3D) reconstructed image, smoothing homogenous areas and enhancing edges of the original reconstructed image using edge enhancing diffusion (EED) to create edge-enhanced image data, and calculating a structural importance map. The structural importance map includes a measure of structural importance for each voxel of data in the original reconstructed image. Voxel intensities to be used to create a filtered image are determined according to at least one rule applied to the measure of structural importance.