IMAGE PROCESSING AND DATA ANALYSIS IN COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY

Computed Tomography (CT) is a non-invasive technique to provide CT images of every part of the human body without superimposition of adjacent structures. Measurements with X-ray CT are subject to a variety of imperfections or image artifacts including: quantum noise, X-ray scattering by the patient, beam hardening and nonlinear partial volume effects. Image processing with Adobe Photoshop, ImageJ, Corel PHOTO-PAINT and Origin software has been used in order to achieve good quality images for quantitative analysis. Image enhancement technique allows the increasing of the signal-to-noise ratio and accentuates image features by modifying the colors or intensities of an image. It also includes linear and nonlinear filtering, deblurring and automatic contrast enhancement. Statistical functions enable to analyze the general characteristics of a neuroimage by displaying the image histogram or plotting the profile of intensity values. Data analysis of CT images can help distinguish between a neurological disease, a common disorder like Major Depression (MD) or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and a normal brain.