METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR BONE SUPPRESSION BASED ON A SINGLE X-RAY IMAGE

A method and system for suppressing bone structures based on a single x-ray image is disclosed. The bone structure suppressing method predicts a soft-tissue image without bone structures from an input x-ray image. A set of features is extracted for each pixel of the input x-ray image. A soft-tissue image is then generated from the input x-ray image using a trained regression function to determine an intensity value for the soft-tissue image corresponding to each pixel of the input x-ray image based on the set of features extracted for each pixel of the input x-ray image. The extracted features can be wavelet features and the regression function can be trained using Bayesian Committee Machine (BCM) to approximate Gaussian process regression (GPR).