Enhancement of Medical Images through an Iterative McCann Retinex Algorithm: A Case of Detecting Brain Tumor and Retinal Vessel Segmentation

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 12; no. 16; p. 8243
• Main Authors: Almalki, Yassir Edrees, Jandan, Nisar Ahmed, Soomro, Toufique Ahmed, Ali, Ahmed, Kumar, Pardeep, Irfan, Muhammad, Keerio, Muhammad Usman, Rahman, Saifur, Alqahtani, Ali, Alqhtani, Samar M., Hakami, Mohammed Awaji M., S, Alqahtani Saeed, Aldhabaan, Waleed A., Khairallah, Abdulrahman Samir
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-08-2022
• Subjects: Abnormalities; Algorithms; Blood vessels; Brain cancer; brain MRI; Brain research; brain tumor detection; Brain tumors; Diabetes; Diabetic retinopathy; Eye diseases; Image contrast; Image enhancement; Image processing; Image quality; Industrialized nations; Magnetic resonance imaging; McCann Retinex algorithm; Medical imaging; Methods; Neuroimaging; Preprocessing; Retina; Retinal images; retinal vessel segmentation; Signal to noise ratio; Tumors; Wavelet transforms
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/app12168243

Analyzing medical images has always been a challenging task because these images are used to observe complex internal structures of the human body. This research work is based on the study of the retinal fundus and magnetic resonance images (MRI) for the analysis of ocular and cerebral abnormalities. Typically, clinical quality images of the eyes and brain have low-varying contrast, making it challenge to diagnose a specific disease. These issues can be overcome, and preprocessing or an image enhancement technique is required to properly enhance images to facilitate postprocessing. In this paper, we propose an iterative algorithm based on the McCann Retinex algorithm for retinal and brain MRI. The foveal avascular zone (FAZ) region of retinal images and the coronal, axial, and sagittal brain images are enhanced during the preprocessing step. The High-Resolution Fundus (HRF) and MR brain Oasis images databases are used, and image contrast and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) are used to assess the enhancement step parameters. The average PSNR enhancement on images from the Oasis brain MRI database was about 3 dB with an average contrast of 57.4. The average PSNR enhancement of the HRF database images was approximately 2.5 dB with a contrast average of 40 over the database. The proposed method was also validated in the postprocessing steps to observe its impact. A well-segmented image was obtained with an accuracy of 0.953 and 0.0949 on the DRIVE and STARE databases. Brain tumors were detected from the Oasis brain MRI database with an accuracy of 0.97. This method can play an important role in helping medical experts diagnose eye diseases and brain tumors from retinal images and Oasis brain images.