Patent ID: 8605970

Claim:
A method of producing a denoised medical image at a specified resolution, comprising: a) denoising an original medical image acquired at a resolution higher than the specified resolution; and b) reducing the resolution of the original medical image, after denoising, to the specified resolution, using a nonlinear resolution reduction procedure including the steps of: (i) decomposing the thinner slices into band-pass components; (ii) for at least some of the band-pass components, combining the thinner slice components into thicker slice components in a way that, at least sometimes, gives more weight to a thinner slice component for which the component has a higher amplitude; and (iii) re-assembling the thicker slice band-pass components for each thicker slice, to produce the image at the specified resolution wherein the original medical image is a three-dimensional image including thinner slices of an original thickness, and reducing the resolution includes fusing multiple thinner slices using the nonlinear resolution reduction procedure to obtain an image with thicker slices.