Figure 2

Vertical line profile for smoothing methods from Figure 1 . The boundary and vessel voxels are identical for the Masked Smoothing and original values, since Masked Smoothing was only applied to the tissue values. The Simple and Removed smoothing methods had identical results except near the vessel voxels. The Simple Smoothing method over estimates the true value of the tissue near the vessel and underestimates the true value near the boundary. The Removed Smoothing methods underestimates the true value both near the boundary and vessel. For points away from both the boundary and vessel the three smoothing methods gave identical results. The smoothing kernel applied was 2 x 2 x 2 mm for all methods.