An Improved Approach for Contrast Enhancement of Spinal Cord Images based on Multiscale Retinex Algorithm

This paper presents a new approach for contrast enhancement of spinal cord medical images based on multirate scheme incorporated into multiscale retinex algorithm. The proposed work here uses HSV color space, since HSV color space separates color details from intensity. The enhancement of medical image is achieved by down sampling the original image into five versions, namely, tiny, small, medium, fine, and normal scale. This is due to the fact that the each versions of the image when independently enhanced and reconstructed results in enormous improvement in the visual quality. Further, the contrast stretching and MultiScale Retinex (MSR) techniques are exploited in order to enhance each of the scaled version of the image. Finally, the enhanced image is obtained by combining each of these scales in an efficient way to obtain the composite enhanced image. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is validated by using a wavelet energy metric in the wavelet domain. Reconstructed image using proposed method highlights the details (edges and tissues), reduces image noise (Gaussian and Speckle) and improves the overall contrast. The proposed algorithm also enhances sharp edges of the tissue surrounding the spinal cord regions which is useful for diagnosis of spinal cord lesions. Elaborated experiments are conducted on several medical images and results presented show that the enhanced medical pictures are of good quality and is found to be better compared with other researcher methods.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, International Journal of Imaging and Robotics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.571

Antidiarrheal evaluation of Benincasa hispida (Thunb.) Cogn. fruit extracts

The methanolic extract of fruit of Benincasa hispida (BHFE) was evaluated for its antidiarrheal potential against several experimental models of diarrhea in rats. BHFE treated animals showed significant inhibitory activity against castor oil induced diarrhea and inhibited PGE2 induced enter pooling in rats. It also showed significant reduction in gastro intestinal motility following charcoal meal in rats. The result obtained and establishes the efficacy of BHFE as an antidiarrheal agent