Investigating Suitability of Inverse Tone Mapping for Medical Images

Standard dynamic range (SDR) technology has been the foundation of medical imaging to this day, making medical images lack contrast and details. To address this issue, a feasible option before adopting high dynamic range (HDR) technology in the medical image capturing is to use inverse tone mapping (iTMO) to convert SDR images into HDR images. This approach can synthetically recover some of the information lost during the SDR capturing process and increase the contrast and overall brightness of the image. This paper is the first study that evaluates the performance of existing famous iTMOs for the medical images. In our study we used Breast Cancer Biopsy whole slide images as an example type of medical images. Our performance evaluations showed that some iTMOs achieved a significant improvement in visual quality, offering a better contrast and details, and the potential to help the accuracy at diagnosis phases.