1Fundamentals of Biomedical Image Processing

Summary. This chapter gives an introduction to the methods of biomedical image processing. After some fundamental preliminary remarks to the terminology used, medical imaging modalities are introduced (Sect. 1.2). Sections 1.3 and 1.4 deal with low-level image processing and visualization, respectively, as far as neces-sary to understand the following chapters. Subsequently, the core steps of image analysis, namely: feature extraction, segmentation, classification, quantitative mea-surements, and interpretation are presented in separate sections. On account of its high relevance, the focus is on segmentation of biomedical images. Special seg-mentation methods and techniques have been developed in the medical application domain. Section 1.9 provides a brief summary of image communication. The elec-tronic transmission and exchange of medical images will become more important in future for multimedia applications such as electronic patient records in health telem-atics and integrated care. Section 1.10 completes this chapter with an overview of past, present, and future challenges to biomedical image processing. 1.