Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Why is this? Maybe the clinical applications are not relevant for day-to-day
patient management. This does not appear to be a sustainable view either
from the literature or from the view of centers using this technology. It may
be that image registration generally forms only one part of a complete image
analysis application, and other components, notably image segmentation and
labeling, are still not sufficiently robust or automated for routine clinical use. In
many applications, this is undoubtedly the case. Perhaps some of the problems
with segmentation will be solved by nonrigid atlas registration (see Chapter 14).
Another important factor is that to achieve widespread use, the clinical com-
munity and the medical imaging industry that supports it must embrace this
new technology more effectively. This will require investment in order to: 1)
ensure that technical validation and clinical evaluation are effective and
timely; 2) proceed rapidly down the path of standardization and integration
of information sources in healthcare so that innovative products from small
companies can be incorporated earlier and more cheaply into the healthcare
environment; 3) ensure that image registration becomes automatic or virtu-
ally automatic so that it is robust and transparent to the user; and, finally, 4)
ensure that the clinical community, and its scientific and technical support
staffs, are made fully aware of the power of this new technology and that
medical practice evolves to take full advantage of it.
We hope that this topic will go some way in encouraging goals 1, 2, and 3
above by contributing to goal 4.
We are very grateful to the contributing authors for sharing our vision that
the time is right for a topic on medical image registration, for the effort they
have put into their chapters, and, in particular, for responding to our sugges-
tions for making the topic a more coherent whole.
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