Abstract:

In the intensive care unit (ICU) a portable chest X-ray machine is used by clinicians to help monitor the progression of the patient and identify the location of various medical tubes in the patient's body.However the chests from the portable chest X-ray machine have the defects of low contrast,noise,and vague image of tubes on chests,making it difficult for radiologist to locate the tubes.This study presents a method for detecting tubes in ICU portable chest X-ray image.First a contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) process is performed on the patient's chest obtained to adjust the contrast information.Then bilateral filtering is used to smooth the chest and keep edge at the same time.Finally the tube detection is done on the image.The approach was applied on about 100 images taken from a portable chest X-ray machine,the results show that the proposed method can effectively detect the tubes in ICU chest radiographs with an accuracy approaching 90%.

Key words: intensive care unit;low contrast chest;contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization;bilateral filtering;pipeline inspection