The goal of this research is to develop an open and extensible medical image analysis environment which allows rapid prototyping, validation, and deployment of medical imaging algorithms. This environment frees the analyst from having to deal with low level programming issues. Such an environment would facilitate the sharing of knowledge, data and algoriths as well as providing groupware capabilities for collaborative work or diagnosis. Most software systems currently available for image analysis are either too general and do not provide medical image support, or are too rigid and focused on specific applications. Our software environment will concentrate on medical imaging and we will demonstrate it's flexibility for developing various sophisticated imaging applications encompassing the areas of image segmentation, image registration, and computer-aided diagnosis. Our software environment uses recent advances in software technology in the area of distributed objects to provide an industry-standard method for seamless integration between diverse applications. This technology also allows easy customizability, extensibility and cross-platform compatibility of an application and Internet connectivity. This environment integrates a variety of components including, an object oriented fourth generation programing language; a fully customizable Graphical User Interface; a database management system extensive libraries for image processing, statistical and mathematical analyses; and, advanced visualization.
We envision two types of users for this software environment--(1) medical imaging researchers or medical imaging solution providers, and (2) clinicians or clinical researcher. The first type of users will be able to customize the application completely. The second type of users will use the software for specific applications. Our building-block approach to the design of this environment will allow rapid customization for different applications and for the different types of users.
