Imaging and image processing for integrated understanding of multi-modal medical images

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For advanced and protective medicine, it is an important study to establish reliable multi-modal image evaluation and to construct a supporting system for diagnosis corresponding to the physiological dynamics of organ or tissue. On this purpose, imaging and image processing techniques must be key-technologies to obtain both morphological and functional information and to improve each observation by using mutual information.It is started to realize new CT imaging techniques for functional and morphological image. In synchrotron radiation imaging, we have succeeded to describe them simultaneously by using fluorescent and Compton scattering phenomena on the target organ with considerable effect of mutual information. In case of the combination with fluorescent X-ray CT and phase-contrast CT images, we can evaluate properly the situation of functional changes of organ. Trans-illumination optical CT is also developed and discussed to utilize attenuation coefficient and spectrum broadening of transmitted light to characterize target organ such as human finger joint.For clinical evaluation of cardiac wall function, we have already developed an interactive 3D display system where functional information from SPECT are superposed on 3D morphological description from MRI, and succeeded to demonstrate the validity of integrated presentation. Here we have developed an automatic processing procedure for this purpose by using clear described organs near the target organ.We have also developed several procedures in automatic 3D registration on image fusion for PET/MRI and SPECT/MRI images, and to get a few parameters for quantitative clinical evaluation. Further effort is now concentrated on tuning processing parameters corresponding individual target for clinical use.