Chest radiograph image enhancement with wavelet decomposition and morphological operations

Medical image processing algorithms significantly affect the precision of disease diagnostic process. This makes it crucial to improve the quality of a medical image with the goal to enhance perceivability of the points of interest in order to obtain accurate diagnosis of a patient. Despite the reliance of various medical diagnostics on X-rays, they are usually plagued by dark and low contrast properties. Sought-after details in X-rays can only be accessed by means of digital image processing techniques, despite the fact that these techniques are far from being perfect. In this paper, we implement a wavelet decomposition and reconstruction technique to enhance radiograph properties, using a series of morphological erosion and dilation to improve the visual quality of the chest radiographs for the detection of cancer nodules.