Chapter 9 - Contrast improvement of medical images using advanced fuzzy logic-based technique

Abstract

Medical images like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, hematoxylin and eosin (HE) stain images, and others play a vital role in the automatic medical diagnosis process. It hastens the process of the diagnosis as well as improving the accuracy over the manual process. But medical images often seem to suffer from low contrast problems, and an accurate result can be expected only from a good quality image. Hard-based techniques are applied for contrast improvement as they involve less complexity, but they are not able to bring the result to a satisfactory level. The main reason behind this is a high level of fuzziness involved in medical images. Because traditional techniques are not able to deal with this level of fuzziness, an advanced fuzzy logic–based technique is introduced in this chapter for improving the contrast of different medical images like HE stain, MRI, and so on. Also, as noise puts a very bad effect on the overall quality of medical images, before going for contrast improvement, in the proposed approach, noise removal using an improved median filter is implemented first. This imparts a very good impact on the final result of the enhancement process. The experimental analysis claims the efficiency of the proposed technique.