Generation of Pseudo Chest X-ray Images from Computed Tomographic Images by Nonlinear Transformation and Bone Enhancement

抄録

CT examination, which can obtain the three-dimensional information of the body, is essential in modern medicine. The three-dimensional data can be converted to two-dimensional data, and ray-sum processing is available as an application provided in image visualization software. However, the conventional ray-sum image obtained by simply projecting the CT image in the anteroposterior direction has unclear borders. In this study, we developed a novel method to generate realistic chest X-ray images from CT images. In the proposed method, CT images are projected, and a pseudo chest image is generated by nonlinear transformation, bone enhancement, unsharp masking processing, and normalization. The similarity to the actual chest X-ray images was compared by histogram analysis and visual evaluation of the pseudo chest X-ray image obtained by the proposed method and the ray-sum image obtained by the conventional method. Our results indicate that the proposed method may be effective for pseudo chest X-ray image generation using CT images.