The Combination of Data-Driven Machine Learning Approaches and Prior Knowledge for Robust Medical Image Processing and Analysis

Book excerpt: With the availability of big image datasets and state-of-the-art computing hardware, data-driven machine learning approaches, particularly deep learning, have been used in numerous medical image (CT-scans, MRI, PET, SPECT, etc..) computing tasks, ranging from image reconstruction, super-resolution, segmentation, registration all the way to disease classification and survival prediction. However, training such high-precision approaches often require large amounts of data to be collected and labelled and high-capacity graphics processing units (GPUs) installed, which are resource intensive and hence not always practical. Other hurdles such as the generalization ability to unseen new data and difficulty to interpret and explain can prevent their deployment to those clinical applications which deem such abilities imperative.