**Part 1**

**Basic Concepts in Medical Imaging** 

**1** 

*Brazil* 

**Identification of Structures in Medical Images<sup>1</sup>**

Eduardo Tavares Costa3,4 and Marco Antonio Gutierrez1 *1Heart Institute (InCor) - University of São Paulo Medical School* 

*4Center for Biomedical Engineering - University of Campinas* 

*3School of Electrical and Computer Engineering- University of Campinas* 

*2Polytechnic School – University of São Paulo* 

Marina de Sá Rebelo1, Sérgio Shiguemi Furuie2, Lincoln de Assis Moura Jr2,

The development of automatic systems for medical image processing, which can effectively act as an agent to aid medical diagnosis, is a goal that has been pursued by researchers since the first works on the field of medical image processing in the 80´s. The automation of image analysis tasks can produce very interesting results such as less time spent by specialists, decrease of intra-and inter-observer differences, second opinions to non-specialists and in educational systems. Any automatic system deployed for analysis and visualization of images involves the identification of objects and often the relationships among them. The automatic identification of structures is a research area of image processing that still has great challenges. In tasks that involve primarily activities of calculation, the computer's processing power is incomparably higher than the humans. However, in recognition and analysis tasks, the human brain possesses a strong ability that is not obtained by any computational system. For a given scene, humans possess a unique ability to distinguish the objects that are significant and,

In the routine of medical image analysis, doctors often deal with images in which the visual perception is not sufficient for identification of some particular structure under study. They need, therefore, conceptual hypotheses so as to perform this task. At each new image analyzed a doctor uses a huge amount of knowledge accumulated over the years of clinical practice. This is a typical feedback and a case base reasoning system, as each new image analyzed gives the doctor more knowledge about a specific problem. A system of medical aid for identification and analysis of structures should also be able to incorporate and use

Automatic recognition and identification of structures are fields of Computer Vision. The recognition of structures is a difficult task because many factors influence its computation.

1 Portions adapted, with permission, from *Computers in Biology and Medicine* 37 (2007) 1183 – 1193

among them, those that represent the focus of interest for a particular situation.

**1. Introduction** 

knowledge about the problem domain.

**2.1 Problem statement** 

**2. Identification of structures in digital images** 
