Objective: Adaptive and automatic adjustment of the display window parameters for magnetic resonance images under different viewing conditions is a challenging problem in medical image perception. An adaptive hierarchical neural network-based system with online adaptation capabilities is presented to achieve this goal in this paper.
Methodology: The online adaptation capabilities are primarily attributed to the use of the hierarchical neural networks and the development of a new width/center mapping algorithm. The large training image set is hierarchically organized for efficient user interaction and effective re-mapping of the width/center settings. The width/center mapping functions are estimated from the new user-adjusted width/center values of some representative images by using a global spline function for the entire training images as well as a first-order polynomial function for each selected image sequence. The hierarchical neural networks are then re-trained for the new training data set after this mapping process.
Results: The proposed automatic display window parameter adjustment system is implemented as a program on a personal computer for testing its adaptation performance. Experimental results show that the proposed system can successfully adapt its parameter adjustment on a variety of MR images after user re-adjustment and re-training of neural networks.
Conclusion: This demonstrates the effective adaptation capabilities of the proposed system based on the framework of training data mapping and neural network re-training.