Comparison of scene-based interpolation methods applied to CT abdominal images

Three-dimensional (3-D) interpolation from 2-D image slices is widely used to aid the display, analysis and other biomedical image processing. We investigate the performance of 5 scene-based interpolation methods: linear, cubic spline, modified cubic spline and sine-based functions (Dirichlet apodization and Hanning apodization). We test our methods on four sets of computed tomography (CT) abdominal images, which have more organs in them compared to other biomedical images. Results show that, contrary to the 1-D or 2-D cases, linear interpolation acts as well as, even slightly better than all the other methods in the sense of signal to noise ratio in most cases, while the computational load of linear interpolation is only about half of the other methods. The reason for the relative high performance of linear interpolation is probably the large distance between consecutive images, which indicates low inter-slice correlation.