title: Development of automated image stitching system for radiographic images.
abstract: Standard X-ray images using conventional screen-film technique have a limited field of view that is insufficient to show the full bone structure of large hands on a single frame. To produce images containing the whole hand structure, digitized images from the X-ray films can be assembled using image stitching. This paper presents a new medical image stitching method that utilizes minimum average correlation energy filters to identify and merge pairs of hand X-ray medical images. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in the experiments involving two databases which contain a total of 40 pairs of overlapping and non-overlapping hand images. The experimental results are compared with that of the normalized cross-correlation (NCC) method. It is found that the proposed method outperforms the NCC method in classifying and merging the overlapping and non-overlapping medical images. The efficacy of the proposed method is further indicated by its average execution time, which is about five times shorter than that of the other method.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University Malaya, 50603, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. salbiah2000@gmail.com
authors.forename: Salbiah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Samsudin
authors.forename: Somaya
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Adwan
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Arof
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mokhtar
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ibrahim
mesh_terms: D016477:Artifacts; D001331:Automation; D006225:Hand / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006801:Humans; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement; D011857:Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D011873:Radiology Information Systems / Q000458:organization & administration*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity