Precision Imaging: more descriptive, predictive and integrative imaging

Abstract

Medical image analysis has grown into a matured field challenged by progress made across all medical imaging technologies and more recent breakthroughs in biological imaging. The cross-fertilisation between medical image analysis, biomedical imaging physics and technology, and domain knowledge from medicine and biology has spurred a truly interdisciplinary effort that stretched outside the original boundaries of the disciplines that gave birth to this field and created stimulating and enriching synergies. Consideration on how the field has evolved and the experience of the work carried out over the last 15 years in our centre, has led us to envision a future emphasis of medical imaging in Precision Imaging. Precision Imaging is not a new discipline but rather a distinct emphasis in medical imaging borne at the cross-roads between, and unifying the efforts behind mechanistic and phenomenological modelbased imaging. It captures three main directions in the effort to deal with the information deluge in imaging sciences, and thus achieve wisdom from data, information, and knowledge. Precision Imaging is finally characterised by being descriptive, predictive and integrative about the imaged object. This paper provides a brief and personal perspective on how the field has evolved, summarises and formalises our vision of Precision Imaging for Precision Medicine, and highlights some connections with past research and current trends in the field.

Simulation and Synthesis in Medical Imaging

“…At this point, we make explicit that the notion of “medical image” we use here refers to any spatially (or spatio-temporally) resolved mapping or function [item 5) in the Appendix] to any physical or physiological parameter space, even if that space is non-measurable and hence derived from a computer-based synthesis or simulation. In this case, we can refer to “virtual” or “in silico” medical imaging [item 6) in the Appendix]. This has as a side-effect that while phenomenologic model can issue forecasts (i.e.…”

Detecting Clinically Meaningful Shape Clusters in Medical Image Data: Metrics Analysis for Hierarchical Clustering Applied to Healthy and Pathological Aortic Arches

“…All correctly assigned subjects for each class are shown on the diagonal of the matrix. For each of the three classes Classj [1,3], the total number of true positives (TPj, e.g. in case of the CTRL class, the actual CTRLs that were correctly classified as CTRL), false positives (FPj, e.g.…”

“…Modern medical imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging provide detailed and accurate anatomical and functional information of inner body structures and organs, making them widely used tools for diagnosis and treatment planning. Consequently, medical image databases are growing and valuable patient data are accumulating, calling for novel approaches to process and extract clinically relevant information not only on a case-by-case basis, but also considering entire patient populations [1], [2], [3].…”

“…Automated clustering techniques from the field of data mining have been widely used in genomics, taxonomy and chemoinformatics to structure large amounts of data into subgroups, thereby revealing previously unknown, yet relevant patterns within a given population [9], [10]. We believe that such an approach may prove beneficial as well for the analysis of complex three-dimensional (3D) anatomical models from medical image data in order to close the gap between mere data and useful knowledge, as desired in current Precision Medicine or "Precision Imaging" approaches [3]. Clinical image assessment of inner body structures usually reveals a patient's dominant pathology, but it often remains unclear how individual image data relate to other patients with the same disease or primary diagnosis.…”

Application of Multimodality Imaging Fusion Technology in Diagnosis and Treatment of Malignant Tumors under the Precision Medicine Plan

“…[9] Minimally invasive treatment guided by medical imaging navigation is one precise treatment method for malignant tumors. [1011]…”