Identification of Structures in Medical Images

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