Single-image hard copy display of musculoskeletal digital radiographs
Kevin Legendre, Dorothy Steller Artz, Matthew T. Freedman, Seong K. Mun · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1995
Screen film radiography often fails to optimally display all regions of anatomy on muskuloskeletal exams due to the wide latitude of tissue densities present. Various techniques of image enhancement have been applied to such exams using computerized radiography but with limited success in improving visualization of structures whose final optical density lies at the extremes of the interpretable range of the film. An existing algorithm for compressing optical density extremes known as dynamic range compression has been used to increase the radiodensity of the retrocardiac region of the chest or to decrease the radiodensity of the edge of the breast in digital mammography. In the skeletal system, there are regions where a single image may contain both areas of decreased exposure that result in light images and areas of higher exposure that result in dark regions of the image. Faced with this problem, the senior author asked Fuji to formulate a modification of the DRC process that incorporates a combination of the curves used for chest and breast images. The newly designed algorithm can thus simultaneously lower the optical density of dark regions of the image and increase the optical density of the less exposed regions. The results of this modification of the DRC algorithm are presented in this paper.