Medical Physics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Medical Physics, including details on medicine, radiotherapy, biomechanics, medical imaging.

Information Entropy Measure for Evaluation of Image Quality.

Tsai DY, Lee Y, Matsuyama E

Department of Radiological Technology, School of Health Sciences, Niigata University, 2-746, Asahimachi-dori, Niigata, 951-8518, Japan, tsai@clg.niigata-u.ac.jp.

This paper presents a simple and straightforward method for synthetically evaluating digital radiographic images by a single parameter in terms of transmitted information (TI). The features of our proposed method are (1) simplicity of computation, (2) simplicity of experimentation, and (3) combined assessment of image noise and resolution (blur). Two acrylic step wedges with 0-1-2-3-4-5 and 0-2-4-6-8-10 mm in thickness were used as phantoms for experiments. In the present study, three experiments were conducted. First, to investigate the relation between the value of TI and image noise, various radiation doses by changing exposure time were employed. Second, we examined the relation between the value of TI and image blurring by shifting the phantoms away from the center of the X-ray beam area toward the cathode end when imaging was performed. Third, we analyzed the combined effect of deteriorated blur and noise on the images by employing three smoothing filters. Experimental results show that the amount of TI is closely related to both image noise and image blurring. The results demonstrate the usefulness of our method for evaluation of physical image quality in medical imaging.

Published 19 June 2007 in J Digit Imaging.
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