Introduction¶

Medical imaging is increasingly gaining importance in medicine. Radiologists use images to detect diseases in an early stage (via screening), to diagnose patients with symptoms, and to monitor the effect of treatment. In pathology digitization of microscopy imaging is just starting, enabling pathologists to use computerized analysis of high-resolution gigapixel images to better diagnose disease in tissue samples. However, as the complexity of imaging (3D/4D) and the amount of data increases the interpretation of images by humans becomes problematic. Therefore, there is a growing need for intelligent image analysis systems that can aid clinicians with image interpretation and decisions. The goal of these systems is to reproduce visual skills of highly trained human observers and to provide quantitative analysis. For this purpose, machine learning is applied to develop a computer model that can be trained exploiting information from a large amounts of medical images.

In recent years, deep learning has emerged as the state-of-the-art approach for image analysis applications. While human readers still are superior in most applications, convolutional neural networks have been successfully applied to medical imaging problems like automated reading of mammograms for breast cancer detection, automatic detection of pulmonary nodules for lung cancer screening, detection of breast and prostate cancer in histopathology images and segmentation of white matter lesions in brain magnetic resonance, amongst others, de facto gradually bridging the gap between humans and computers. More information can be found on Wikipedia's Computer Aided Diagnosis Page.