Scalable edge enhancement with automatic optimization for digital radiographic images

The ability to resolve fine picture detail is of paramount importance in medical imaging systems for viewing small tissue, bone structure and anatomy in X-ray images. In this paper, we present a new digital radiographic image processing system with the property of scalability and adaptability. (i) A new automatic optimization algorithm is proposed for display. (ii) An adaptive detection of a region-of-interest is developed. (iii) A "scalable edge enhancement algorithm" is proposed to improve the image quality for showing subtle structures in digital radiographic images. The advantage of the proposed method is demonstrated through experiments on 200 digital X-ray images and 50 CT images, in which different parts of human body structures are captured. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.