Topics Tagged ‘Imaging’
Medical Imaging
The increasing capabilities of medical imaging devices have strongly facilitated diagnosis and surgery planning. During the last decades, the technology has evolved enormously, resulting in a never-ending flow of high-dimensional and high-resolution data that need to be visualized, analyzed, and interpreted. The development of computer hardware and software has given invaluable tools for performing these tasks, but it is still very hard to exclude the human operator from the decision making. The process of stating a medical diagnosis or to conduct a surgical planning is simply too complex to fully automate. Therefore, interactive or semi-automatic methods for image analysis and visualization are needed where the user can explore the data efficiently and provide his or her expert knowledge as input to the methods.
All software currently being written for medical imaging systems have to conform to the DICOM (Digital Imaging in Communication in Medicine) standards to ensure that different systems from different vendors can successfully share information).so, you can, for example, acquire the image from a Siemens viewing station and do the processing on Philips multimodal stations (the same station being able to easily process say MRI as well as CAT scan images) are already in common use. Vendors are also able to send private information that only their software and viewing stations can read, so as to enhance their equipment. For example a Philips acquisition system can acquire and transmit more information than prescribed by the standard. Such extra information can be deciphered only by the standard. Even though the basic job is that of image processing, the algorithms used in medical software can be vastly different from say those used in other commercial image manipulation software like movie software or Photoshop. The reason behind this is that medical systems have to preserve a very high degree of accuracy and detail or there could be fatal results.
