Butler, Anthony Philip Howard2009-09-022009-09-022007http://hdl.handle.net/10092/2780http://dx.doi.org/10.26021/2130The goal of this research was to improve the speed and accuracy of reporting by clinical radiologists. By applying a technique known as eigenimage processing to chest radiographs, abnormal findings were enhanced and a classification scheme developed. Results confirm that the method is feasible for clinical use. Eigenimage processing is a popular face recognition routine that has only recently been applied to medical images, but it has not previously been applied to full size radiographs. Chest radiographs were chosen for this research because they are clinically important and are challenging to process due to their large data content. It is hoped that the success with these images will enable future work on other medical images such as those from CT and MRI. Eigenimage processing is based on a multivariate statistical method which identifies patterns of variance within a training set of images. Specifically it involves the application of a statistical technique called principal components analysis to a training set. For this research, the training set was a collection of 77 normal radiographs. This processing produced a set of basis images, known as eigenimages, that best describe the variance within the training set of normal images. For chest radiographs the basis images may also be referred to as 'eigenchests'. Images to be tested were described in terms of eigenimages. This identified patterns of variance likely to be normal. A new image, referred to as the remainder image, was derived by removing patterns of normal variance, thus making abnormal patterns of variance more conspicuous. The remainder image could either be presented to clinicians or used as part of a computer aided diagnosis system. For the image sets used, the discriminatory power of a classification scheme approached 90%. While the processing of the training set required significant computation time, each test image to be classified or enhanced required only a few seconds to process. Thus the system could be integrated into a clinical radiology department.enCopyright Anthony Philip Howard Butlercomputer aided diagnosisradiographeigenimage processingsingular value decompositionprincipal components analysisTheses / Dissertations