A method including receiving data corresponding to an original
three-dimensional (3D) reconstructed image, smoothing homogenous areas
and enhancing edges of the original reconstructed image using edge
enhancing diffusion (EED) to create edge-enhanced image data, and
calculating a structural importance map. The structural importance map
includes a measure of structural importance for each voxel of data in the
original reconstructed image. Voxel intensities to be used to create a
filtered image are determined according to at least one rule applied to
the measure of structural importance.