Recent trends in Medical Image Processing

It is said that images bear the greatest density of natural information of all ways of human communication, and biomedical images do not make any exception to this assertion, at least when dealing with morphologic information. The recent rapid advances in medical imaging and automated image analysis will continue and allow us to make significant advances in our understanding of life and disease processes, and our ability to deliver quality healthcare. Medical imaging and image processing domains mainly manage and process missing, ambiguous, inconsistent, complementary, contradictory, redundant and distorted data, and information has a strong structural character. The processes of human and artificial understanding of any image involve the matching of features extracted from the image with pre-stored models. From the information technology point of view the production of a high-level symbolic model requires the representation of knowledge about the objects to be modeled, their relationships, and how and when to use the information stored within the model. In general, a distinction is made between (bio)medical imaging and image processing technologies, even if between these fields of knowledge a strong interrelation may be established.