Abstract
Advanced radiology practices are already benefiting from powerful and increasingly
more economical computing and networking facilities. Medical image processing methods
have improved dramatically over the past five years, with sophisticated 3D display,
visualization and analysis techniques allowing increased integration of multiple modalities
of imaging, flexible environments for imaging analysis, and P ACS (picture archiving
and communication systems) for ease of transmission and retrieval. Emerging directions
involve teleradiology and telesurgery virtual reality applications, the development
of new image database techniques, and the building of large visual databases like
that of the Visible Human Project. Challenging problems of image segmentation, registration,
and multimodal image fusion are still with us. Building dynamic, flexible electronic
atlases will have a profound effect on the understanding of structure and function
from the level of cellular physiology to gross anatomy, but requires the development
of new techniques of visual knowledge representation and more standardized ways of
defining the conceptual and linguistic constructs of visual objects in biomedicine,
for linkage to medical records, research results, and educational materials. Methods
for reasoning with visual information in the context of multimedia information systems
present an inviting challenge to the upcoming generation of researchers in medical
informatics.
Keywords
Medical Image Processing - Informatics - Image Segmentation - 3D Image Visualization
- Medical Image Databases
