Statistical and syntactic pattern recognition

This chapter gives an overview about the most important approaches in statistical and syntactic pattern recognition and their application to biomedical imaging. Parametric and nonparametric estimation methods and binary decision trees form the basis for most classification problems related to bioimaging while grammatical inference and graphical methods are the basic classification paradigms in syntactic pattern recognition. The chapter also reviews the diagnostic accuracy of classification measured by ROC-curves, and presents application examples based on statistical classification methods.