Application of ink-jet printer for medical images

Abstract

We developed the new printer system for medical images with the latest ink-jet technology. The system uses “five kinds of gray ink” which has different density in order to reproduce a precise density step. The parameters for density reproduction were optimized by the experimental results of the minimum resolution of the density step of human eyes on the film image printed by a conventional medical laser imager. We also evaluated the reliability of the system based on the results from the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis.The result shows that the ink-jet printer system has quite similar characteristics with a dry imager.