Unenhanced T1-and T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)offers useful information for the diagnosis of hepatic nodules in cirrhosis that is not obtainable by contrast-enhanced CT. Gadolinium-enhanced MRI reinforces the usefulness of liver MRI by providing additional information on the hemodynamics of hepatic nodules. In the presentation, the usefulness of MRI in the radiologic diagnosis of focal hepatic lesions and cirrhosis was described, showing updated imaging techniques, application of computer-aided diagnosis, and future perspective.

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The experience of clinical use of breast CAD system at the hospital of Gifu University School of Medicine was reported. The CAD system was Image Checker M1000-DM available for Senographe 2000D. During February 4, 2005 to May 16, 125 cases was examined by this device and 22cases of breast cancers were found. A case was misdiagnosed by radiologist before CAD, and CAD detected the lesion. Another case was correctly detected by radiologist before CAD, but CAD could not point out the lesion. 20 remain cases were detected correctly by both radiologist and CAD. CAD was supposed to be useful for the mammographic diagnosis of breast cancer, and further development based on the various view point, for example breast cancer risk rate etc is expected.

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Aorta extraction from chest CT images is an important topic in computer-aided diagnosis. Kitasaka et al proposed a method for the automated aorta extraction based on the model matching and showed the usefulness using the real CT images. In this paper, we describe a method to improve the decision of initial model location and the evaluation function in the model matching process of the Kitasaka's method. The improved method was applied to 30 patient cases and the result showed that the method worked well for all of the cases.

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Liver cirrhosis is usually diagnosed with histological findings of liver biopsy sample. However, liver biopsy, sampling liver tissues from a living donor, is an invasive technique, in which a direct puncture of the liver is needed. On the other hand, higher resolution of recent computed tomography(CT) has a potential to replace histology with objective and digital images, which are available without any invasive techniques. Here we present a system extracting various features of three-dimensional vasculature in the liver from images of CT aiming an objective and noninvasive diagnosis of liver cirrhosis.

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Recognizing the human anatomical structure is an important process for the CAD system using the 3-D multi-slice CT images. The identified bone frames provide the useful information of human anatomical structure. In this research, we propose a method to identify the structure of chest bone frame by classifying the chest bone frame into 5 parts (spine, sternum, ribs, shoulder blades, and clavicles). In this method, we generate the probabilistic atlases of chest bone structure from pre-recognized structures of bone frames, and make a classification of unidentified bone frames based on the atlases. We applied this method to 53 cases of the 3-D multi-slice CT images, and confirmed its effectiveness from the results.

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