MEDICAL IMAGE PROCESSING

· *Medical imaging refers to the “techniques and processes used to create images of the human body for clinical purposes”

· *It also refers to study about human anatomy and other cytological changes in human.

· *As a discipline and in its widest sense, it is part of biological imaging and incorporates

· *Radiology* *Radiology* *Endoscopy* *Thermography* *medical photography* and *microscopy*.

· e.g. for human pathological investigations- urine culture, blood test

· *Measurement and recording techniques which are not primarily designed to produce images, such as electroencephalography(EEG) and magnetoencephalography(MEG) and others, but which produce data susceptible to be represented as maps(i.e. containing positional information), can be seen as forms of medical imaging.

· *In the clinical context, medical imaging is generally equated to Radiology or "clinical imaging"

· *The medical practitioner responsible for interpreting images is called a radiologist.

· *Diagnostic radiography designates the technical aspects of medical imaging and in particular the acquisition of medical images.

· *The radiographer or radiologic technologist is usually responsible for acquiring medical images of diagnostic quality.

As a field of scientific investigation, medical imaging constitutes a sub-discipline of:

1. Biomedical engineering,

2. Medical physics,

3. Medicine,

4. Physics,

5. Computer science,

6. Radiology,

7. Neuroscience,

8. Cardiology,

9. Psychiatry,

10. Psycology.

Depending on the context:

· Research and development in the area of instrumentation,

· Image acquisition (e.g.radiography),

· Modelling and

· Quantification.

· *Medical imaging is often perceived to designate the set of techniques that non-invasively produce images of the internal aspect of the body.

· *In this restricted sense, medical imaging can be seen as the solution of the mathematical inverse problems.

· *This means that cause (the properties of living tissue) is inferred from effect of the observed signal.

· *In the case of ultrasonography the probe consists of ultrasonic pressure waves and echoes inside the tissue show the internal structure.

· *In the case of projection radiography, the probe is X-ray radiations which is absorbed at different rates in different tissue types such as bone, muscle and fat.

· Thus medical image processing has lead to development of industrial and other upcoming and existing fields of science and technology.