Patent ID: 8520916

Claim:
A method carried out by a computer for displaying a radiographic image comprising: identifying a region of interest in a portion of the radiographic image; the region of interest including low interest, high signal level image content including anatomical structures and non-anatomical foreign objects which overlap high interest image content exhibiting a relatively low signal level; suppressing the low interest, high signal level background image content including anatomical structures and non-anatomical foreign objects within the identified region of interest and enhancing contrast of the overlapping high interest image content exhibiting a relatively low signal level within the region of interest without enhancing the overlapping low interest, high signal level image content, thereby to form an enhanced region of interest; and displaying the enhanced region of interest within the remaining portion of the radiographic image; further comprising suppressing artifacts within the identified region of interest wherein suppressing artifacts comprises: identifying an object by applying a threshold to detect the object within the region of interest; isolating the object from background content; and replacing image data for one or more pixels identified within the object with calculated values wherein replacing image data for one or more pixels comprises: identifying an artifact region that contains the object; dividing the artifact region into an array of smaller blocks; ranking each block according to relative percentage of missing data that are identified as artifacts; and replacing missing pixels of each block with predetermined substitute pixel values.