The average operation and MIP operation are both useful in viewing medical images. These as the most common techniques to view portions of s 3D volume on a 2D display.
Chapters
00:00. Intro
00:30. Average operation
02:00. MIPS (Maximum Intensity Projection)
The average operation is great to reduce noise in the image volume but does yield a smoother image (ie. the edges aren’t as sharp). In axial imaging or reformat imaging the average operation is a great way to reduce the volume of images for review as well.
The Maximum Intensity projection is most effective when the volume contains fewer areas of interest (ie it is sparsely filled such as angiography CTA or MRA.) In these scenarios MIPS have sharper edges than average images.
The maximum intensity projection is easy to calculate as for each ray you just find the largest valve on the ray. The average operation is also a direct calculation as you just add up the voxels on each ray path and divide by the number of voxels.
In this video we demonstrate this effect with a simple 4x4 matrix where we take the average and MIP operation.
