Research On SARS Medical Image Detection And Computer Aided Diagnosis

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome(SARS), also known as 'Atypical Pneumonia' in China, was a newly arisen infectious disease which is threatening lives and health of all human race. According to the statistics data publicized by The Ministry of Health of P.R.C and the World Health Organization, up to 31th of July 2003, there were totally 5,327 cases reported in China, accounts to 65.6% percent of all cases in the world. Another four cases were confirmed and reported in our country by 2004. Detecting and diagnosing suspected SARS cases quickly and accurately is very important for medical researching and public health. Confined to lacking of experiences or capability, many physicians can't dealing SARS correctly and efficiently. This went against the endeavor to treat and control of the outbreak of this epidemic disease. So there was a pressing requirement of utilizing modern computer techniques to detect and diagnosis SARS cases in time. At the same time, the research carried out by this thesis also provide references for some other newly broken out respiratory disease such as avian influenza.Since 1970s, using computer techniques to processing and analyzing medical images has been initialized. The corresponding works include diagnosis of coal-workers' penumoconiosis,pulmonary tuberculosis and other relatively advanced area such as breast cancer. As an intercourses discipline, this area combines modern information techniques with many other research fields, such as medical image diagnosis, image analysis, data processing and expert system. Along the fasting development of medical and computer technology since 1990, automatic detection and diagnosis system for medical images gained more and more attention from medical and computer societies. More attention was focused on breast cancer in our country, and less emphases were given to other disease such as pulmonary and brain related diseases. Though the outbreak of SARS brought disastrous expense to our country, it also let us accumulate abundant materials and experiences of dealing with SARS. All these advantages are fundamental to the research of this thesis. Some other works had been unfolded during this years. But most of these works were only confined to the modeling of this epidemic disease's transmitting, expert system and other related data analysis. Almost no reports dealing with medical images of SARS. Constructing computer aided diagnosis SARS system...