  Nuclear medicine (NM) images inherently suffer from large amounts of noise
and blur. The purpose of this research is to reduce the noise and blur while
maintaining image integrity for improved diagnosis. The proposed solution is to
increase image quality after the standard pre- and post-processing undertaken
by a gamma camera system. Mean Field Annealing (MFA) is the image processing
technique used in this research. It is a computational iterative technique that
makes use of the Point Spread Function (PSF) and the noise associated with the
NM image. MFA is applied to NM images with the objective of reducing noise
while not compromising edge integrity. Using a sharpening filter as a
post-processing technique (after MFA) yields image enhancement of planar NM
images.
