Investigating the Effectiveness of Color Coding in Multimodal Medical Imaging

In medical imaging, images represent the quantification of the interaction between electromagnetic waves and our body and are represented in grey-scale. In addition, medical imaging often produces multimodal images. However, the analysis and interpretation of these images mostly occur in sequence or, as in the case of automatic tools, they are simply concatenated as independent sources of information. In both cases, color perception and color contrast are not exploited. Color perception and color contrast play a crucial role in human vision to recognize objects effectively and efficiently, and this can in principle extend to automatic systems. In this paper we show how color coding, particularly using color opponent models, can become an effective tool for preliminary color-based segmentation. Tests have been conducted on multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the brain collected in a public database and the results obtained show the importance of color coding in medical imaging analysis.