Abdomen and Thoracic Imaging

The book covers novel strategies of state of the art in engineering and clinical analysis and approaches for analyzing abdominal imaging, including lung, mediastinum, pleura, liver, kidney and gallbladder. In the last years the imaging techniques have experienced a tremendous improvement in the diagnosis and characterization of the pathologies that affect abdominal organs. In particular, the introduction of extremely fast CT scanners and high Magnetic field MR Systems allow imaging with an exquisite level of detail the anatomy and pathology of liver, kidney, pancreas, gallbladder as well as lung and mediastinum. Moreover, thanks to the development of powerful computer hardware and advanced mathematical algorithms the quantitative and automated\semi automated diagnosis of the pathology is becoming a reality. Medical image analysis plays an essential role in the medical imaging field, including computer-aided diagnosis, organ/lesion segmentation, image registration, and image-guided therapy. This book will cover all the imaging techniques, potential for applying such imaging clinically, and offer present and future applications as applied to the abdomen and thoracic imaging with the most world renowned scientists in these fields. The main aim of this book is to help advance scientific research within the broad field of abdominal imaging. This book focuses on major trends and challenges in this area, and it presents work aimed to identify new techniques and their use in medical imaging analysis for abdominal imaging.