Some perspectives on the decision theoretic approach to medical images

An image often contains information that is not extracted by the human decision maker. This is due to two limitations of the eye-brain system: the existence of a contrast threshold, as with any device that works in the presence of noise (internal or external), and an evolutionary pattern that has not fitted us for viewing noisy scenes, leaving us suboptimal in that regard. Since it is often impossible to overcome these limitations simultaneously--even electronically--multiple displays of the image content must be available to the human viewer, and contrast scale and degree of sharpness/smoothing must be tunable. Our planning must anticipate these requirements, a greater dependence on digital computers for the image manipulation, and the computer's inevitable involvement in the decision process.