Toward the Development of an Intelligent System for the Diagnosis of Multiple Organs and Diseases

The performance of CT scanners has been improved substantially over the past few years. Nowadays, it is possible to scan an entire human body and generate high-resolution CT images in an extremely short period of time. On the other hand, radiologists in Japan are increasingly overloaded. To answer the needs, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT for short) in Japan funded a set of research projects categorized as "Intelligent Assistance in Diagnosis of Multi-dimensional Medical Images". As one of the funded research projects, this research aims at the development of a multi-organ, multi-disease CAD system. With this system, the diagnosis of multi-organ and multi-disease could be possible by processing a single set of CT images. This paper presents a couple of milestones achieved so far, which include the visualization of virtual models, a methodology for the integration of multiple CAD systems, and some breakthroughs in the intelligent assistance in the diagnosis of lung abnormalities.