A novel marker enhancement filter (MEF) for fluoroscopic images

Abstract

To enhance the measurements of radio-opaque cylindrical fiducial markers in low contrast x-ray and fluoroscopic images, a novel nonlinear marker enhancement filter (MEF) has been designed. It was primarily developed to assist in automatic initialization of a tracking procedure for intra-fraction organ motion analysis in fluoroscopic sequences. Conventional procedures were not able to provide sufficient improvement due to the complications of …