A synthetic method for improving magnetic resonance image contrast: Simulation and phantom study

Magnetic resonance imaging has been widely applied in many clinical diagnoses. In order to increase the accuracy of diagnosis, it is crucial to improve the image quality. This paper proposed a method that modifies the bilateral filter with automatic parameter selection in local contrast correction (LCC) capable to adjust image contrast while maintaining high image quality in MRI. The proposed approach was validated by using both simulated images and MR images of an ACR phantom. The results confirmed that the proposed method outperforms several existing methods in both quantitative measurements and visual evaluations.