Medical Image Processing
Chapter from the book:
Meydan,
İ.
&
Demir,
C.
(eds.)
2024.
Radiation Physics and Health Effects I.
Synopsis
. Image processing technology, which has begun tobeusedmorewiththewidespread use of computer-based systems, is one of the most important areas of technological developments in our age. Health informatics is one of the branches of science that emerged with the widespread use of computers. This branchofsciencehasenabledtheemergenceand development of medical imaging. The discovery of X-rays, which is also one of the greatest developments in human history, made medical imaging possible. The development of these two technologies has enabled great advances in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and medical imaging has become the most used method in the healthcare industry. With the development of this field, storage areas for medical images were needed. Cloud storage technology, which is used in many areas, has also taken its place in the healthcare sector. Using these images stored in cloud-based large data storage systems, various software is produced for computer-aided diagnosis and supports the decision-making processes of physicians. Thanks to image processing technology, the long process of acquiring, storing, improving and finally analyzing images has become shorter and easier with the help of computer-aided systems. Images obtained by methods such as computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and nuclear medicine consist of a series of processes such as improving the quality of the images and extracting their meaning through image processing techniques. These steps can generally be grouped into low, medium, and high leveloperations. While low-level operations are defined asimageacquisitionandbasicoperations; mid- and high-level operations are characterized by more complex analysis and feature extraction. Image processing, a technology frequentlyusedincomputervisionsystemstoday, plays an important role especially in fields such as artificial intelligence and deep learning.All techniques used are very important in studies conducted in deep learningfieldstoextract meaningful information from imagesandenabledecisionmakingusingthisinformation.
As a result, image processing enables the diagnosis and treatment of diseases to be carried out more effectively, especially in the healthcare sector.