Lumbar Spine MRI Images Quality Enhancement through Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization

Lumbar spine MRI is important for accurately diagnosing spinal issues, where the clarity and quality of images highly influence medical examinations. This work determines the effectiveness of Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) as a contrast enhancement preprocessing approach to enhance lumbar spine MRI images visualization. Considering the importance of clear and precise visualization in clinical settings, this approach is evaluated in comparison to the conventional Histogram Equalization (HE) and the Retinex Algorithm, both widely used for image enhancement. The comparison study focuses on performance metric to evaluate the quality of images, including PSNR, SSIM, EPI and CPU time. Results illustrate that CLAHE outperforms HE and the Retinex , delivering better PSNR and SSIM values, leading to greater contrast enhancement and structural feature retention as well. These findings suggest that CLAHE provides more successful preprocessing strategy for lumbar spine MRI, having great potential to increase diagnostic accuracy. Further research focuses on the integration of CLAHE with optimization techniques to improve image enhancement in medical imaging.