Structural analysis in medical imaging

The conventional techniques in Pattern Recognition (PR) have been greatly improved by the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches, in particular for knowledge representation, inference mechanism and control structure. The purpose of this paper is to describe an image understanding system, based on the integrated approach (AI - PR), developed in the author's Department to interpret Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) images. The system is characterized by a heterarchical control structure and a blackboard model for the global data-base. The major aspects of the system are pointed out, with particular reference to segmentation, knowledge representation and error recovery (backtracking). The eye slices obtained in the case of two patients have been analyzed and the related results are discussed