Color intensity projections with hue cycling for intuitive and compressed presentation of motion in medical imaging modalities

Abstract

Color intensity projections (CIPs) has been employed to improve the accuracy and reduce the workload of interpreting a series of grayscale images by summarizing the grayscale images in a single color image. CIPs – which has been applied to grayscale images in angiography, 4D CT, nuclear medicine and astronomy – uses the hue, saturation and brightness of the color image to encode the summary information. In CIPs, when a pixel has the same value over the grayscale images, the corresponding pixel in the color image has the identical grayscale color. The arrival time of a signal at each pixel, such as the arrival time of contrast in angiography, is often encoded in the hue (red-yellow-green-light blue-blue-purple) of the corresponding pixel in the color image. In addition, the saturation and brightness of each pixel in the color image encodes the amplitude range and amplitude maximum of the corresponding pixel in the grayscale images. In previous applications of CIPs the hue has been limited to less than one cycle over the color image to avoid the aliasing due to a hue corresponding to more than one arrival time. However, sometimes in applications such as angiography and astronomy, in some instances the aliasing due to increasing the number of cycles of hue over the color image is tolerable as it increases the resolution of arrival time. Key to applying hue cycling effectively is interpolating several grayscale images between each pair of grayscale images. Ideally, the interpreter is allowed to adjust the amount of hue cycling in realtime to find the best setting for each particular CIPs image. CIPs with hue cycling should be a valuable tool in many fields where interpreting a series of grayscale images is required.