Medical imaging is a very important area in diagnostic (and increasingly therapeutic) medicine. Many new techniques are being developed or extended which depend on digital methods. Although conventional x-radiographs still comprise the bulk of the medical images acquired in a hospital, digital methods such as computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging are now often claimed to have a more significant clinical impact. This book is concerned with three aspects of such digital images: their formation, or how they can be acquired; their handling, or how they may be manipulated to increase their clinical value; and their evaluation, or how their impact and value may be assessed. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 comprises a series of reviews in the general subject area written by authorities in the field. Part 2 includes papers on theoretical aspects: 3D images, reconstruction, perception, and image processing. Part 3includes papers on applications in nuclear medicine, magnetic resonance, andradiology.

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1. An Introduction to and Overview of the Field.- Image reconstruction and the solution of inverse problems in medical imaging.- Regularization techniques in medical imaging.- New insights into emission tomography via linear programming.- Mathematical morphology and medical imaging.- Multiscale methods and the segmentation of medical images.- Voxel-based visualization of medical images in three dimensions.- Perception and detection of signals in medical images.- Artificial intelligence in the interpretation of medical images.- Picture archiving and communications systems: progress and current problems.- Evaluation of medical images.- 2. Theoretical Aspects.- 2.1 3-D.- A 3-D model of the global deformation of a non-rigid body.- Simulation studies for quality assurance of 3D-images from computed tomograms.- Interactive volume rendering using ray-tracing for 3-D medical imaging.- 2.2 Reconstruction.- Data augmentation schemes applied to image restoration.- The concept of causality in image reconstruction.- On the relation between ART, block-ART and SIRT.- Preliminary results from simulations of tomographic imaging using multiple-pinhole coded apertures.- Aspects of clinical infrared absorption imaging.- 2.3 Perception.- On the relationship between physical metrics and numerical observer studies for the evaluation of image reconstruction algorithms.- Psychophysical study of deconvolution for long-tailed point-spread functions.- 2.4 Image Processing.- Mathematical morphology in hierarchical image representation.- Fault-tolerant medical image interpretation.- Second moment image processing (SMIP).- 3. Applications.- 3.1 Nuclear Medicine.- Applications of iterative reconstruction methods in SPECT.- Computer simulated cardiac SPECT data for use in evaluating reconstruction algorithms.- Collimator angulation error and its effect on SPECT.- The design and implementation of modular SPECT imaging systems.- Computer evaluation of cardiac phase images using circular statistics and analysis of variance.- 3.2 Magnetic Resonance.- A method for correcting anisotropic blurs in magnetic resonance images.- Iconic fuzzy sets for MR image segmentation.- 3.3 Radiology.- Reversible data compression of angiographic image sequences.- The measurement of absolute lumen cross sectional area and lumen geometry in quantitative angiography.- multiple source data fusion in blood vessel imaging.- A method for multi-scale representation of data sets based on maximum gradient profiles: initial results on angiographic images.- Fast techniques for automatic local pixel shift and rubber sheet masking in digital subtraction angiography.- List of Participants.