Morphological enhancement of coronary angiograms

Two ways of applying morphological image processing techniques (MORPH) to cardiac angiography images are identified. First, arterial contrast can be selectively increased using contrast-containing images alone. Second, MORPH can be used as a preprocessing step to preflatten both the contrast and mask images prior to subtraction. This procedure, called MORPH-DSA, removes most of the gray-scale changes due to the beating of the heart. This reduces subtraction artifacts and allows a sequence of subtracted images to be displayed with a narrower gray-scale window-width than that following normal DSA processing.<>