Summary
Medical imaging helps physicians to take a view inside the human body and therefore allows better treatment and earlier diagnosis of serious diseases.
However, as straightforward as the idea itself is, so diversified are the technical difficulties to overcome when implementing a clinically useful imaging device.
We begin this course by discussing all available modalities and the actual imaging goals which highly affect the imaging result.
Some modalities produce very noisy results, but there are multiple other artifacts that show up in raw acquisition data and have to be dealt with. We address these issues in the chapter preprocessing and show how to compensate for image distortions, how to interpolate defect pixels, and finally correct bias fields in magnetic resonance images.
The largest portion of this course covers the theory of medical image reconstruction. Here, from a set of projections from different viewing angles a 3-D image is merged that allows a definite localization of anatomical and pathological features. Following roughly the historical development of CT devices, we study the process from parallel beam to fan beam geometry and include a discussion of phantoms as a tool for calibration and image quality assessment. We then move forward and learn about reconstruction in 3-D. Since the system matrix often grows in dimensions such that many direct solvers become infeasible, we also discuss pros and cons of iterative methods.
In the final chapter, image registration is introduced as the concept of computing the mapping that maps the content of one image to another. Two different acquisitions usually result in images that are at least rotated and translated against each other. Image registration forms the set of tools that we need to match certain image features in order to align both images for further processing, image improvement or image overlays.
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