Improved implementation of the abnormality manipulation software tools

Collecting clinical cases for medical imaging perception studies is often challenging. We have developed a suite of software tools for manipulating medical tomographic image sets that overcome these difficulties. In our initial development, abnormalities were removed or inserted on a slice-by-slice basis. To circumvent the problem with potential artifacts in orthogonal views, we have redesigned the tools so that they operate in 3 dimensions. An operator controlled ellipsoid mask region is used to select the removal and the replacement areas. This new approach has been validated on PET data sets and has also been implemented for CT studies.