**3. Biomedical applications of CAD**

Over the past few decades, several CAD systems have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to help in imaging situations [13]. Many investigators have studied CAD for diagnosis of various types of diseases, including lung diseases [14, 15], breast cancer [16, 17], stroke [18], liver cancer [19], microcalcifications [20], and artery disease [21].

At present, researchers worldwide have reached a consensus on the meaning of CAD in medical imaging. The final clinical decisions are still determined by doctors rather than machines, but doctors refer to computer output results before they make the final decisions. This makes the diagnosis more objective and accurate. They emphasize that the output of the computer is only a second opinion, which is different from the original concept of automatic computer diagnosis in the 1960s and 1970s.

The applications of CAD in medical imaging can help radiologists to improve diagnostic accuracy and consistency of image and disease interpretation. In other words, the computer outputs can be used as an auxiliary diagnosis but cannot be used as an ultimate diagnosis. The CAD system can help radiologists to improve the diagnostic accuracy because the diagnosis is entirely a subjective judgment process in traditional diagnostic methods, which will be limited and influenced by the experience and knowledge level of the radiologists. Radiologists may miss some minor changes in the diagnosis of disease. Besides, different radiologists may lead to different results due to image reading differences. The objective judgment of computer has excellent advantages in correcting these errors and shortcomings.

### **Acknowledgements**

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61701159, JZ2017GJQN1131), the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (Grant No. 101413246, JZ2017AKZR0129), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JZ2018HGTB0236), and the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (Grant No. 2160311028).

**5**

**Author details**

Lulu Wang1,2\* and Liandong Yu1

and liandongyu@hfut.edu.cn

Hefei University of Technology, China

Shenzhen Technology University, China

provided the original work is properly cited.

\*

1 School of Instrument Science and Opto-electronics Engineering,

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

2 College of Health Science and Environmental Engineering,

\*Address all correspondence to: luluwang2015@hfut.edu.cn

*Introductory Chapter: Computer-Aided Diagnosis for Biomedical Applications*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88835*
