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To investigate the effect of preprocessing techniques including contrast enhancement and illumination correction on retinal image quality, a comparative study was carried out. We studied and implemented a few illumination correction and contrast enhancement techniques on color retinal images to find out the best technique for optimum image enhancement. To compare and choose the best illumination correction technique we analyzed the corrected red and green components of color retinal images statistically and visually. The two contrast enhancement techniques were analyzed using a vessel segmentation algorithm by calculating the sensitivity and specificity. The statistical evaluation of the illumination correction techniques were carried out by calculating the coefficients of variation. The dividing method using the median filter to estimate background illumination showed the lowest Coefficients of variations in the red component. The quotient and homomorphic filtering methods after the dividing method presented good results based on their low Coefficients of variations. The contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization increased the sensitivity of the vessel segmentation algorithm up to 5% in the same amount of accuracy. The contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization technique has a higher sensitivity than the polynomial transformation operator as a contrast enhancement technique for vessel segmentation. Three techniques including the dividing method using the median filter to estimate background, quotient based and homomorphic filtering were found as the effective illumination correction techniques based on a statistical evaluation. Applying the local contrast enhancement technique, such as CLAHE, for fundus images presented good potentials in enhancing the vasculature segmentation.

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BackgroundThe process of medical image fusion is combining two or more medical images such as Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and mapping them to a single image as fused image. So purpose of our study is assisting physicians to diagnose and treat the diseases in the least of the time.MethodsWe used Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) as input images, so fused them based on combination of two dimensional Hilbert transform (2-D HT) and Intensity Hue Saturation (IHS) method. Evaluation metrics that we apply are Discrepancy (Dk) as an assessing spectral features and Average Gradient (AGk) as an evaluating spatial features and also Overall Performance (O.P) to verify properly of the proposed method.ResultsIn this paper we used three common evaluation metrics like Average Gradient (AGk) and the lowest Discrepancy (Dk) and Overall Performance (O.P) to evaluate the performance of our method. Simulated and numerical results represent the desired performance of proposed method.ConclusionsSince that the main purpose of medical image fusion is preserving both spatial and spectral features of input images, so based on numerical results of evaluation metrics such as Average Gradient (AGk), Discrepancy (Dk) and Overall Performance (O.P) and also desired simulated results, it can be concluded that our proposed method can preserve both spatial and spectral features of input images.

BackgroundElectroencephalogram (EEG) signals of a brain contain a unique pattern for each person and the potential for biometric applications. Authentication and security is a very important issue in our life and brainwave-based authentication is an addition to biometric authentication systems, which has many advantages over others. In this paper, we study the performance of a single channel brainwave-based authentication systems and select optimum channels based on mental activities.MethodsIn this study, we used a dataset with five mental activities with seven subjects (325 samples). The EEG based authentication system includes three pre-processing steps, feature extraction, and classification. Features for Subject Authentication, are obtained from discrete Fourier transform, discrete wavelet transform, autoregressive modeling, and entropy features. Then these features are classified using the Neural Network, Bayesian network and Support Vector Machine.ResultsWe achieved accuracy in the range of 97–98% mean accuracy with Neural Network classifier for single-channel authentication system with optimum electrode placement for mental activity. We also analyzed the authentication system independently from the type of mental activity and chose channel O2 as the optimum channel with an accuracy of 95%.ConclusionsChannel optimization can obtain higher performance by reducing the number of EEG channels and defined the optimum electrode placement for different mental activities.

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