A wavelet-based spatially adaptive method for mammographic contrast enhancement.

A method aimed at minimizing image noise while optimizing contrast of image features is presented. The method is generic and it is based on local modification of multiscale gradient magnitude values provided by the redundant dyadic wavelet transform. Denoising is accomplished by a spatially adaptive thresholding strategy, taking into account local signal and noise standard deviation. Noise standard deviation is estimated from the background of the mammogram. Contrast enhancement is accomplished by applying a local linear mapping operator on denoised wavelet magnitude values. The operator normalizes local gradient magnitude maxima to the global maximum of the first scale magnitude subimage. Coefficient mapping is controlled by a local gain limit parameter. The processed image is derived by reconstruction from the modified wavelet coefficients. The method is demonstrated with a simulated image with added Gaussian noise, while an initial quantitative performance evaluation using 22 images from the DDSM database was performed. Enhancement was applied globally to each mammogram, using the same local gain limit value. Quantitative contrast and noise metrics were used to evaluate the quality of processed image regions containing verified lesions. Results suggest that the method offers significantly improved performance over conventional and previously reported global wavelet contrast enhancement methods. The average contrast improvement, noise amplification and contrast-to-noise ratio improvement indices were measured as 9.04, 4.86 and 3.04, respectively. In addition, in a pilot preference study, the proposed method demonstrated the highest ranking, among the methods compared. The method was implemented in C++ and integrated into a medical image visualization tool.