Shaima Ibraheem Jabbar
Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine
Automatic contrast enhancement of musculoskeletal ultrasound
image
Ultrasonography is widely used in the diagnosis of musculoskeletal problems. Low
image contrast is one of the problems of ultrasound images and affects the quality
significantly. This leads to difficulty in the interpretation of the image contents
correctly. Imaging systems in ultrasonography can give an expert a chance to adjust
image contrast based on their expertise and machine performance, but not on the
variability of the image properties. In this work we introduce a method to enhance
image contrast automatically. It is appropriate to consider contrast enhancement
based on the analysis of the image features rather than depending only on the
performance of the operator. The structure of our work consists of three main steps.
Firstly, using a fuzzy image technique (a kind of artificial intelligence method) to
achieve enhancement of image contrast. The robustness of this technique comes
from optimization of the parameters of the fuzzy image technique which depend
mainly on image features like entropy (measurement of the image randomness).
Secondly, we perform contrast enhancement by using histogram equalization
method as a comparative method. The final step is qualitative and quantitative
assessment to illustrate the performance of the proposed method compared to the
histogram equalization method.
Postgraduate Conference 2016
Page 32