Image quality assessment of color monitors for medical soft copy display

If medical images are presented on a general-purpose workstation or PC, and applied display is most commonly a color monitor. The majority of the displayed images, however, is monochrome. In the present paper, measurement and modeling procedures for the characterization of color monitors for monochrome applications are described. The luminance and spatial resolution behavior for gray-scale presentation is assessed by judging the contribution of the three color channels red, green, and blue according to the spectral sensitivity of the human eye. A series of color CRT- and active matrix LCD- monitors for an image matrix of 1280 X 1024 and screen diagonals of 18 inch-20 inch is analyzed. As compared with monochrome CRTs, the color CRT- monitors generally have much lower luminance and a reduced ntra-scene dynamic range. Although the image quality of LCD- monitors has been significantly improved in the last years, they still have problems in gray-scale of LCD-monitors rendition and viewing angle. Due to the limited luminance and dynamic range of color display systems, the calibration and control of their luminance curve is a very important task if they are widely used for medical reviewing.