A method of medical image enhancement using wavelet-coefficient mapping functions

An approach to medical image enhancement is proposed. In this method, non-linear mapping functions are derived for projecting a set of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients to a new set of DWT coefficients. The mapped coefficients are then inverse wavelet transformed. Applications of the proposed method to the chest x-ray images and mammograms with subtle micro-calcifications are shown. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compared the results to those obtained by the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and the conventional wavelet-based (CWB) methods. Our preliminary results strongly suggest that the proposed method offers considerably improved enhancement capability over the FFT and CWB methods.