Medical Image Enhancement Using Morphological Transformation

Medical imaging includes different modalities and processes to visualize the interior of human body for diagnostic and treatment purpose. However, one of the most common degradations in medical images is their poor contrast quality and noise. The existence of several objects and the close proximity of adjacent pixels values make the diagnostic process a daunting task. The idea of image enhancement techniques is to improve the quality of an image. In this study, morphological transform operation is carried out on medical images to enhance the contrast and quality. A disk shaped mask is used in Top-Hat and Bottom-Hat transform and this mask plays a vital role in the operation. Different types and sizes of medical images need different masks so that they can be successfully enhanced. The method shown in this study takes a mask of an arbitrary size and keeps changing its size until an optimum enhanced image is obtained from the transformation operation. The enhancement is achieved via an iterative exfoliation process. The results indicate that this method improves the contrast of medical images and can help with better diagnosis.