Region sharpening technique for biomedical images

The authors describe a region-sharpening technique that expands earlier work. The technique has two steps: (1) definition of a set of sector templates; and (2) application of the templates to an image. An arbitrary number of arbitrarily sized sectors can be defined. Thus, varying levels of region sharpening can be achieved. When the technique is applied to cardiac X-ray CT (computed tomography) images containing a contrast-enhanced left-ventricular chamber the myocardium and chamber become more sharply defined and noise is reduced. Since the technique is not context-dependent, it is applicable to other imaging modalities.