An interactive medical image processing system based on a hybrid computer architecture

The paper presents an interactive segmentation system that uses a parallel processing architecture. Poor contrasts, variable tissue properties and complex-shaped structures make the isolation of meaningful regions of interest difficult. The interactive approach uses the human user´s knowledge base to assist in image segmentation. The measurement of regions of interest enable the resultant output image to be quantified for clinical purposes. The graphical user interface-developed under Microsoft Windows-incorporates a mouse driven interactive display. A transputer based parallel processing engine is provided for the computationally intensive tasks of the system. These modules of the system communicate with each other using the Windows Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) model