Guidewire contrast enhancement by a two-stage order statistic filter in X-ray fluoroscopy
Yuhao Jiang · International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design · 2015
As a result of an increased number of applications, X-ray fluoroscopy has become one of major sources of diagnostic X-ray dose to patients and staff. It is important to lower X-ray dose while maintaining or improving image quality. A two-stage order statistic filter has been proposed. The first part of the filter is designed to detect the orientation of the guidewire and to reduce the image noise. The second part of the filter is to implement a non-linear discriminator to obtain an optimal output from the outputs generated by the oriented filters used in the first stage. We apply the filter to the X-ray synthetic fluoroscopy image sequences with and without clinical backgrounds. A human observer model is applied to quantitatively assess detection performance of guidewire in unfiltered and filtered image sequences. Our experiment has shown that the filter has effectively improved guidewire visibility in the image sequences.