Efficient presentation of DICOM mammography images using Matlab

DICOM has become a standard for medical imaging. Its purpose is to standardize digital medical imaging and data for easy access and sharing. There are many commercial viewers that support DICOM image format and can read metadata, but image displaying is not always optimal. Since mammography images are mostly 12-bit grayscale images, image viewer has to be adapted for correct displaying when different number of bits has to be allocated. Another problem occurs when only a small portion of amplitudes is of interest to display. In this paper a method for efficient presentation of DICOM mammography images in Matlab is introduced. Algorithm that is developed does automatic contrast and brightness adjustments, regardless of bit dept of an image, number of amplitudes higher than zero and the number of allocated bits.