Implementation of an FPGA Real-Time Configurable System for Enhancement of Lung and Heart Images

Medical imaging analyzes the human body to catch imperfections like tumors, cancer, bone imperfections, malign tissues, and more. These devices produce raw image data that need further processing to achieve an accurate diagnosis. These images have different types of degradations, such as blur, contrast, and noise imperfections. In this project, we have developed a series of filters at the hardware level for image processing (brightness adjustment, contrast enhancement, sharpening, blurring, grayscale, and outline) to improve the quality of the image and assist in diagnosis by medical specialists. The present work implements these applications using VLSI technologies because reconfigurable hardware devices provide higher speed than software implementations. The usage of a descriptive hardware language extends the field of circuitry to medical applications. The necessity of image enhancement techniques using the Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL) has opened the path toward the rapid hardware prototyping of other medical architectures. Preliminary experimental results for images of lungs and heart demonstrated the advantage of using softcore hardware.