Using mutual information to evaluate performance of medical imaging systems
Eri Matsuyama, Du-Yih Tsai, Yongbum Lee, Katsuyuki Kojima
DOI: 10.4236/health.2010.24040   PDF    HTML     5,740 Downloads   10,040 Views   Citations

Abstract

Information on physical image quality of medical images is important for imaging system assessment in order to promote and stimulate the development of state-of-the-art imaging systems. In this paper, we present a method for evaluating physical performance of medical imaging systems. In this method, mutual information (MI) which is a concept from information theory was used to measure combined properties of image noise and resolution of an imaging system. In our study, the MI was used as a measure to express the amount of information that an output image contains about an input object. The more the MI value provides, the better the image quality is. To validate the proposed method, computer simulations were per- formed to investigate the effects of noise and resolution degradation on the MI, followed by measuring and comparing the performance of two imaging systems. Our simulation and experimental results confirmed that the combined effect of deteriorated blur and noise on the images can be measured and analyzed using the MI metric. The results demonstrate the potential usefulness of the proposed method for evaluating physical quality of medical imaging systems.

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Matsuyama, E. , Tsai, D. , Lee, Y. and Kojima, K. (2010) Using mutual information to evaluate performance of medical imaging systems. Health, 2, 279-285. doi: 10.4236/health.2010.24040.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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