Patent ID: 7835491

Claim:
A tomosynthetic image reconstruction method comprising the steps of: reconstructing a tomosynthetic 3D intermediate image from a plurality of slice images respectively obtained from a plurality of digital 2D projection images respectively acquired from different projection angles relative to a subject in a limited angle range, without subjecting said slice images to noise filtering; segmenting microcalcium regions contained in the respective slice images and electronically marking microcalcium voxels respectively associated with said microcalcium regions; selecting at least one of said slice images as at least one subject slice image relevant to said microcalcium region; forward projecting the microcalcium voxels in the segmented microcalcium region of the at least one subject slice image, and marking microcalcium pixels associated with the microcalcium voxels in the 2D projection images; generating noise-filtered 2D projection images by subjecting the microcalcium pixels of the 2D projection images to adaptive noise filtering; and generating a final tomosynthetic 3D x-ray image from the noise-filtered 2D projection images.