An image processing language for digital radiography systems

Digital radiography systems apply various image processing algorithms to the detected raw data to make images look similar to conventional film images. Usually, only a fixed image processing is provided, sometimes slightly parameterizable. To provide greater flexibility to physicians, researchers, and service personnel, we designed and implemented an interpreted language to ease the definition of the processing pipeline. This simple block-structured language allows the processing to be defined very flexibly in terms of basic image processing primitives. Because of the interpretative nature of the language, the imaging processing can be fully customized on-site to the needs of a particular hospital or physician. This approach also allows different types of image processing to be applied after an image has been taken, e.g. when new information about the illness of the patient becomes known. In practice at the Duke University Medical Center, the flexibility and configurability of the system helped to adapt the system to the particular needs of the site. Certain problems related to the state-of-the-art detector could be compensated in software. A locally developed numerical scatter compensation technique has been integrated