ABSTRACT

Whole-Body CT images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 674 20.3.6 PET MR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 675

20.4 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 678 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 680

Medical imaging is the process to create images of human anatomies and structures for clinical

studies. It plays an important role in modern healthcare as it provides high quality human anatomy

images to aid disease monitoring, treatment planning, and prognosis. Its applications include, but

are not limited to, early detection of cancer, image guided radiation therapy, and prediction of treat-

ment outcome. One of the key challenges in the area of medical imaging is how to effectively extract

useful features and information from the image so that insightful understanding of the human struc-

tures and organs imaged can be achieved. Nowadays, computer-aided diagnosis/detection (CAD)

serves as a powerful analytic tools for medical image analysis. Specifically, advanced image pro-

cessing techniques such as image enhancement, image segmentation, and image registration offer

an efficient and effective way to interpret the human anatomy of interest.