A contrast enhancement method for improving the segmentation of breast lesions on ultrasonography

Purpose: This paper presents an adaptive contrast enhancement method based on sigmoidal mapping function (SACE) used for improving the computerized segmentation of breast lesions on ultrasound. Methods: First, from the original ultrasound image an intensity variation map is obtained, which is used to generate local sigmoidal mapping functions related to distinct contextual regions. Then, a bilinear interpolation scheme is used to transform every original pixel to a new gray level value. Also, four contrast enhancement techniques widely used in breast ultrasound enhancement are implemented: histogram equalization (HEQ), contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), fuzzy enhancement (FEN), and sigmoid based enhancement (SEN).
Source: Computers in Biology and Medicine - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: research