Friday, July 12, 2013

Breast Imaging and Computer Aided Diagnosis

When I started studying biomedical engineering and I learned a lit bit about programming, my ingenuity made me think that one day we could build programs that don't need medical doctors. WRONG! Nevertheless, we can still to provide better algorithms and results to medical doctors which make the hard clinical decisions. One of the most challenging tasks for a doctor is to analyze mammograms to find microcalcifications and evaluate the malignity of a lesion. It takes years of experience to be a very good analyst of these images. This is where we can hope to help the medical doctors.

Computer Aided Diagnosis (CADx) and Computer Aided Detection (CAD) are important tools for the medical doctors and a lot of these tools are being investigated and evaluated in the context of breast imaging using mammograms. At the moment, there is still no method which proved to be accurate enough to be brought to clinical practice. More about this can be read in this review:

Ganesan K, Acharya UR, Chua CK, Min LC, Abraham KT, & Ng KH (2013). Computer-aided breast cancer detection using mammograms: a review. IEEE reviews in biomedical engineering, 6, 77-98 PMID: 23247864

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