Visual enhancement of interval changes using a temporal subtraction technique

Temporal subtraction is a visual enhancement technique to improve the detection of pathological changes from medical images acquired at different times. Prior to subtracting a previous image from a current image, a nonrigid warping of the two images might be necessary. As the nonrigid warping may change the size of pathological lesions, the subtraction image can be misleading. In this paper we present an alternative subtraction technique to avoid this problem. Instead of subtracting the intensities of corresponding voxels, a convolution filter is applied to both images prior to subtraction. The technique is demonstrated for computed tomography images of the lungs. It is shown that this method results in an improved visual enhancement of changing nodules compared with the conventional subtraction technique.

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