Incorporating Image Processing in a Clinical Decision support system

A prototype system to assist radiologists in the differential diagnosis of mammographic calcifications is presented. Our approach is to incorporate image-processing operators within a knowledge-based decision support system. The work described in this paper involves three stages. The first is to identify a set of terms that can represent the knowledge required in an example of radiological decision-making. The next is to identify image processing operators to extract the required information from the image. The final stage is to provide links between the set of symbolic terms and the image processing operators.