Medical image computing and image-based simulation: recent developments and advances in Germany

Medical image computing has become a key technology in image-based medical diagnostics and image-guided therapy. In medical diagnostics, methods of image computing enable new insights into the patient’s anatomy and physiology and support the extraction of semantic objects (organs, vessels, tumors, etc.) as well as quantitative parameters (tumor volume, etc.) from the image data. In the field of softwareassisted and navigated therapy,medical image computing has opened up new perspectives for patient treatment. Although methods and systems of medical image computing are yet applied in practice, their grade of automation, accuracy, reproducibility, and robustness has to be increased to meet the requirements in clinical routine [1–7].