Improving the visual quality of abdominal magnetic resonance images using histogram equalization

Histogram equalization is one of the well known enhancement techniques commonly used for medical images. Although easy to be implemented, global histogram equalization sometime produces unnecessary visual deterioration, such as saturation in intensity values. One of the available improved versions of histogram equalization is brightness preserving dynamic histogram equalization (BPDHE). This method has been proposed to be used in consumer electronics. In this paper, we investigate whether this method is also suitable to be employed in medical application or not, especially for abdominal magnetic resonance images. Our preliminary results show that in general, BPDHE can significantly improve the quality of medical data.