Patent ID: 7965879

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for identifying and eliminating chessboard artifacts in MIP images, comprising: accessing volumetric data representative of a medical image volume, the volumetric data having random noise; forming a 3-D voxel grid from the volumetric data; rendering non-mitigated MIP images of the volumetric data along three major axes; calculating an estimated stripe period (ESP) based on a zoom factor of the rendered images; computing average row and column vectors by calculating the mean of each row and column of each MIP image, respectively; performing a 1D Fourier transform on average row vectors and average column vectors; analyzing the resulting frequency spectrum within a predetermined window period to determine if a maximum power within the predetermined window period is greater than a threshold value, wherein the predetermined window period is based on the ESP; and identifying the MIP image as containing a chessboard artifact if the maximum power is greater than the threshold value.