Lessons from my dinners with the giants of modern image science

The author traces some critical moments in the history of Image Science in the last half century from first-hand or once-removed experience. The Image Science used in the field of medical imaging today had its origins in the analysis of photon detection developed for modern television, conventional photography, and the human visual system. Almost all "model observers" used in image assessment today converge to the model originally used by Albert Rose in his analysis of those classic photo-detectors. A more general statistical analysis of the various "defects" of conventional and unconventional photon-imaging technologies was provided by Shaw. A number of investigators in medical imaging elaborated the work of these pioneers into a synthesis with the general theory of signal detectability and extended this work to the various forms of CT, energy-spectral-dependent imaging, and the further complication of anatomical-background-noise limited imaging. The author calls for further extensions of this work to the problem of under-sampled and thus artefact-limited imaging that will be important issues for high-speed CT and MRI.