Information technology applications in biomedical functional imaging

Abstract

Abstract-In parallel with rapid advances in computer technology, biomedical functional imaging is having an ever-increasing impact on healthcare. Functional imaging allows us to see dynamic processes quantitatively in the living human body. However, as we need to deal with four-dimensional time-varying images, space requirements and computational complexity are extremely high. This makes information management, processing, and communication difficult. Using the minimum amount of data to represent the required information, developing fast algorithms to process the data, organizing the data in such a way as to facilitate information management, and extracting the maximum amount of useful information from the recorded data have become important research tasks in biomedical information technology. For the last ten years, the Biomedical and Multimedia Information Technology (BMIT) Group and, recently, the Center for Multimedia Signal Processing have conducted systematic studies on these topics. Some of the results relating to functional imaging data acquisition, compression, storage, management, processing, modeling, and simulation are briefly reported in this paper.Index Terms-Biomedical functional imaging, information technology.

Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval

“…Unlike those anatomical images, functional/molecular images such as PET and SPECT allow the in vivo study of physiological and biochemical processes, providing functional information previously not available. This is what most distinguishes medical images from general images [86,210,211]. Physiological function can be estimated at the molecular level by observing the behavior of a small quantity of an administered substance tagged with radioactive atoms.…”