This book provides a detailed assessment of the state of the art in automated techniques for the analysis of digital mammogram images. Topics covered include a variety of approaches for image processing and pattern recognition aimed at assisting the physician in the task of detecting tumors from evidence in mammogram images. The chapters are written by recognized experts in the field and are revised versions of papers selected from those presented at the “First International Workshop on Mammogram Image Analysis” held in San Jose as part of the 1993 Biomedical Image Processing conference.

This book provides a detailed assessment of the state of the art in automated techniques for the analysis of digital mammogram images. Topics covered include a variety of approaches for image processing and pattern recognition aimed at assisting the physician in the task of detecting tumors from evidence in mammogram images. The chapters are written by recognized experts in the field and are revised versions of papers selected from those presented at the “First International Workshop on Mammogram Image Analysis” held in San Jose as part of the 1993 Biomedical Image Processing conference.

Digital Radiography has been ? rmly established in diagnostic radiology during the last decade. Because of the special requirements of high contrast and spatial resolution needed for roentgen mammography, it took some more time to develop digital m- mography as a routine radiological tool. Recent technological progress in detector and screen design as well as increased ex- rience with computer applications for image processing have now enabled Digital Mammography to become a mature modality that opens new perspectives for the diag- sis of breast diseases. The editors of this timely new volume Prof. Dr. U. Bick and Dr. F. Diekmann, both well-known international leaders in breast imaging, have for many years been very active in the frontiers of theoretical and translational clinical research, needed to bring digital mammography ? nally into the sphere of daily clinical radiology. I am very much indebted to the editors as well as to the other internationally rec- nized experts in the ? eld for their outstanding state of the art contributions to this v- ume. It is indeed an excellent handbook that covers in depth all aspects of Digital Mammography and thus further enriches our book series Medical Radiology. The highly informative text as well as the numerous well-chosen superb illustrations will enable certi? ed radiologists as well as radiologists in training to deepen their knowledge in modern breast imaging.

Computers have become an integral part of medical imaging systems and are used for everything from data acquisition and image generation to image display and analysis. As the scope and complexity of imaging technology steadily increase, more advanced techniques are required to solve the emerging challenges. Biomedical Image Analysis demonstr

Breast cancer is a major health problem in the Western world, where it is the most common cancer among women. Approximately 1 in 12 women will develop breast cancer during the course of their lives. Over the past twenty years there have been a series of major advances in the manage ment of women with breast cancer, ranging from novel chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments to conservative surgery. The next twenty years are likely to see computerized image analysis playing an increasingly important role in patient management. As applications of image analysis go, medical applications are tough in general, and breast cancer image analysis is one of the toughest. There are many reasons for this: highly variable and irregular shapes of the objects of interest, changing imaging conditions, and the densely textured nature of the images. Add to this the increasing need for quantitative informa tion, precision, and reliability (very few false positives), and the image pro cessing challenge becomes quite daunting, in fact it pushes image analysis techniques right to their limits.

Annotation This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2004, held in Calcutta, India in November 2004. The 186 revised papers presented together with 24 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 470 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computational neuroscience, complex-valued neural networks, self-organizing maps, evolutionary computation, control systems, cognitive science, adaptive intelligent systems, biometrics, brain-like computing, learning algorithms, novel neural architectures, image processing, pattern recognition, neuroinformatics, fuzzy systems, neuro-fuzzy systems, hybrid systems, feature analysis, independent component analysis, ant colony, neural network hardware, robotics, signal processing, support vector machine, time series prediction, and bioinformatics.

The 7th International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2004, was held in Saint-Malo, Brittany, France at the “Palais du Grand Large” conference center, September 26–29, 2004. The p- posaltohostMICCAI2004wasstronglyencouragedandsupportedbyIRISA, Rennes. IRISA is a publicly funded national research laboratory with a sta? of 370,including150full-timeresearchscientistsorteachingresearchscientistsand 115 postgraduate students. INRIA, the CNRS, and the University of Rennes 1 are all partners in this mixed research unit, and all three organizations were helpful in supporting MICCAI. MICCAI has become a premier international conference with in-depth - pers on the multidisciplinary ?elds of medical image computing, comput- assisted intervention and medical robotics. The conference brings together cl- icians, biological scientists, computer scientists, engineers, physicists and other researchers and o?ers them a forum to exchange ideas in these exciting and rapidly growing ?elds. The impact of MICCAI increases each year and the quality and quantity of submitted papers this year was very impressive. We received a record 516 full submissions (8 pages in length) and 101 short communications (2 pages) from 36 di?erent countries and 5 continents (see ?gures below). All submissions were reviewed by up to 4 external reviewers from the Scienti?c Review C- mittee and a primary reviewer from the Program Committee. All reviews were then considered by the MICCAI 2004 Program Committee, resulting in the acceptance of 235 full papers and 33 short communications.