medical imaging is the vanguard of signal processing in 21st

Rune Allnor <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:00dcbc6f-7708-4f64-8df3-
29afc14c1243@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

> Second, the general anatomy of the human body is known; medics
> look for individual deviations from well/known baselines. Even
> if one examine non/human animals, the general properties of
> biological tissue don't vary by much.
> 

Medical Imaging is constantly trying to get down to smaller time and space 
scales, as well as to image very small time scale events (like functional 
imaging).  Your description above is way over simplistic.

-- 
Scott
Reverse name to reply

Rune Allnor wrote:
> On 31 Jan, 02:34, Jerry Avins <j...@ieee.org> wrote:
> 
>> Re the subject, certainly not signal processing in general, but perhaps
>> image processing of a particular kind. The vanguard is almost certainly
>> military systems, both for images and signals like sonar, with satellite
>> and other radio communications not lagging by much.
> 
> Medical imaging can't be compared to those sorts of applications.
> 
> First of all, medical applications (usually) have total access to
> the subject; sensors can be fitted all around the outside of the
> human body and some times inside.

Those are exactly the things people are trying hard to work around. Do 
you want things shoved inside you, when a more clever approach could 
analyse a problem from the outside? Why not dump the imaging, and just 
cut people open to see what's going on inside? :-)

> Second, the general anatomy of the human body is known; medics
> look for individual deviations from well/known baselines. Even
> if one examine non/human animals, the general properties of
> biological tissue don't vary by much.

That's an original view.

> Third, the medics are free to manipulate the subject in order to
> facilitate measuremets, e.g. by inserting contrast agents.

Inserting contrast agents is highly undesirable. Look at the comples 
stuff which has been developed, like acoustic microscopes, to avoid the 
need to even stain a slide.

> Medical imaging is a discipline all in its own. Results obtained
> there should not be expected to be useful in other applications.

Huh? If fields didn't heavily cross-fertilise each other we'd never get 
anywhere.

Steve

Steve Underwood wrote:

   ...

> Inserting contrast agents is highly undesirable. Look at the comples 
> stuff which has been developed, like acoustic microscopes, to avoid the 
> need to even stain a slide.

Injected contrast dye is hard on the kidneys. In my case, it is avoided 
unless absolutely necessary, and then preceded, accompanied, and 
followed by protective medication. Not done lightly.

   ...

Jerry
-- 
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
�����������������������������������������������������������������������

On 1 Feb, 00:09, Scott Seidman <namdiestt...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:00dcbc6f-7708-4f64-8df3-
> 29afc14c1...@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com:
>
> > Second, the general anatomy of the human body is known; medics
> > look for individual deviations from well/known baselines. Even
> > if one examine non/human animals, the general properties of
> > biological tissue don't vary by much.
>
> Medical Imaging is constantly trying to get down to smaller time and space
> scales, as well as to image very small time scale events (like functional
> imaging). &#4294967295;Your description above is way over simplistic.

Compare medical imaging to sonar surveying or seismics.
With sonars you know you have to deal with a lot of water,
but what is below that water is completely unknown prior
to the first survey. Same thing with seismics. The first
time around in an area you need to approach with an open
mind.

With humans you know where the lungs, heart and intestines
ought to be. It's the deviations from the expected which
gives the medics what they need to know.

As for functional imaging, the fact that you can put
a person *inside* an MRI device and monitor his
brain responses as he is given various tasks, is
totally unique. There aren't many other applications
where one can build a measurement device which *contains*
the subject of investigation.

As for scale and time refinements, that's pretty universal
in remote sensing applications. Nothing special about
medical imaging.

Rune

On 1 Feb, 00:47, Steve Underwood <ste...@dis.org> wrote:
> Rune Allnor wrote:
> > Even
> > if one examine non/human animals, the general properties of
> > biological tissue don't vary by much.
>
> That's an original view.

A bone is a bone, whether the animal is a horse or an elephant.
Same with muscles. There may be deviations between species in
properties like density etc, but not a lot.

Rune

Rune Allnor wrote:
> On 1 Feb, 00:47, Steve Underwood <ste...@dis.org> wrote:
>> Rune Allnor wrote:
>>> Even
>>> if one examine non/human animals, the general properties of
>>> biological tissue don't vary by much.
>> That's an original view.
> 
> A bone is a bone, whether the animal is a horse or an elephant.
> Same with muscles. There may be deviations between species in
> properties like density etc, but not a lot.

How much medical imaging is trying to tell an animal from a human? I 
thought most of it was trying to distinguish a sick person from a well one.

Some diseases affect bone density, and machines exist to precisely map 
that density throughout a body. Muscles, and especially soft tissue, can 
do some interesting things when mapping the body acoustically. Its at 
least as interesting an acoustic environment as the ocean.

Regards,
Steve

On 1 Feb, 13:29, Steve Underwood <ste...@dis.org> wrote:
> Rune Allnor wrote:
> > On 1 Feb, 00:47, Steve Underwood <ste...@dis.org> wrote:
> >> Rune Allnor wrote:
> >>> Even
> >>> if one examine non/human animals, the general properties of
> >>> biological tissue don't vary by much.
> >> That's an original view.
>
> > A bone is a bone, whether the animal is a horse or an elephant.
> > Same with muscles. There may be deviations between species in
> > properties like density etc, but not a lot.
>
> How much medical imaging is trying to tell an animal from a human? I
> thought most of it was trying to distinguish a sick person from a well one.

Ah, you got thrown off by the slash in 'non/human'?
That was a typo, it should be 'non-human' with a
hyphen.

Sorry 'bout that; it got messed up by me alternately using
Norwegian and English keyboard settings without changing the
keyboard. Sometimes the glyphs on the keys don't correspond
to those written.

> Some diseases affect bone density, and machines exist to precisely map
> that density throughout a body.

My point exactly. You have a known baseline and look
for deviations.

> Muscles, and especially soft tissue, can
> do some interesting things when mapping the body acoustically. Its at
> least as interesting an acoustic environment as the ocean.

That's a different issue altogether; I never said medical
examinations were easy.

Rune

Rune Allnor <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:2ad391f5-ef06-4d4e-a228-
843020a77233@c23g2000hsa.googlegroups.com:

> A bone is a bone, whether the animal is a horse or an elephant.
> Same with muscles. There may be deviations between species in
> properties like density etc, but not a lot.
> 
> Rune
> 
> 

And imaging to find out what proteins are present in a few mm^3 of muscle 
while in an intact prep, for example, has no relevance to imaging in 
general?  Two-photon microscopy is simply a matter of telling if a bone is 
broken?  

-- 
Scott
Reverse name to reply

On 1 Feb, 15:11, Scott Seidman <namdiestt...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in news:2ad391f5-ef06-4d4e-a228-
> 843020a77...@c23g2000hsa.googlegroups.com:
>
> > A bone is a bone, whether the animal is a horse or an elephant.
> > Same with muscles. There may be deviations between species in
> > properties like density etc, but not a lot.
>
> > Rune
>
> And imaging to find out what proteins are present in a few mm^3 of muscle
> while in an intact prep, for example, has no relevance to imaging in
> general?

Not that I can see. In vivo proteins tend to exist only
in biological tissues...

>&#4294967295;Two-photon microscopy is simply a matter of telling if a bone is
> broken? &#4294967295;

What's your point? I don't know that technique,
but I wouldn't be surprised if a detailed micoscropy
method might have some impact in, say, geology where
one brings samples in for studies in the lab.

If you think that this technique will have a broader
impact I am sure you will explain why.

Rune

On Jan 31, 3:49&#4294967295;pm, dbd <d...@ieee.org> wrote:
> On Jan 31, 9:20 am, aruzinsky <aruzin...@general-cathexis.com> wrote:
> ...
>
> > An example of an
> > area without good feedback is the USA judicial system, e.g., recent
> > DNA analysis shows that jurors and judges have a poor history of
> > making correct decisions. &#4294967295;The judicial system isn't going to rapidly
> > improve because there is no easy way to view the results of changes.
>
> It seems ironic that the feedbackless example is a case where new
> technology identified errors that led the system to adapt by adopting
> new technology. Maybe that's feedforward.
>

A judicial system based on statistical decision theory should be
designed by engineers and scientists.  That would also screw lawyers
without expertise in math.

>
> > An area with good feedback from experimental results is Natural Image
> > Processing because it is done on a computer and almost everyone knows
> > what they are looking at and what it should look like. &#4294967295;However, this
> > would be much better if every image processing journal forced authors
> > to post full sized images on the web because you really can't see much
> > in the tiny pictures printed in journals.
>
> If everyone knows 'what they are looking at and what it should look
> like', why should bigger images be a publishing requirement?
>

Almost everyone in the image processing community knows when images
are too small but are unlikely to complain for political reasons.  In
particular, authors with something to hide want small images so they
can get their useless crap published.  For example, in the very
popular paper, Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing by Shai
Avidan and Ariel Shamir, the images are too small and the authors did
not provide larger images for download in web space.  One cannot
properly see the artifacts in these images.   In spite of the
popularity of the paper due to the advertising expertise of the
authors, few people use seam carving.  As an unofficial poll, look at
the retouching forum http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1006
to see how often seam carving is used.

>
> > With respect to good feedback, Medical Imaging falls behind because
> > relatively few people know what they are looking at or what it should
> > look like. &#4294967295;The researchers may almost as well be blind.
>
> That may make it a good thing that only a 'relatively few people'
> practice medical imaging.
>
> Dale B. Dalrymplehttp://dbdimages.comhttp://stores.lulu.com/dbd

Only a small fraction of the people who practice medical imaging know
what they are looking at.  Since nobody previously mentioned that
typical medical images are cartoon quality, I will.