Biomedical Texture Analysis: Fundamentals, Applications, Tools and Challenges describes the fundamentals and applications of biomedical texture analysis (BTA) for precision medicine. It defines what biomedical textures (BTs) are and why they require specific image analysis design approaches when compared to more classical computer vision applications. The fundamental properties of BTs are given to highlight key aspects of texture operator design, providing a foundation for biomedical engineers to build the next generation of biomedical texture operators. Examples of novel texture operators are described and their ability to characterize BTs are demonstrated in a variety of applications in radiology and digital histopathology. Recent open-source software frameworks which enable the extraction, exploration and analysis of 2D and 3D texture-based imaging biomarkers are also presented. This book provides a thorough background on texture analysis for graduate students and biomedical engineers from both industry and academia who have basic image processing knowledge. Medical doctors and biologists with no background in image processing will also find available methods and software tools for analyzing textures in medical images.

This book constitutes the Second 3D Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation in PET/CT Challenge, HECKTOR 2021, which was held in conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2021. The challenge took place virtually on September 27, 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 29 contributions presented, as well as an overview paper, were carefully reviewed and selected form numerous submissions. This challenge aims to evaluate and compare the current state-of-the-art methods for automatic head and neck tumor segmentation. In the context of this challenge, a dataset of 325 delineated PET/CT images was made available for training.

This book constitutes the First 3D Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation in PET/CT Challenge, HECKTOR 2020, which was held in conjunction with the 23rd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2020, in Lima, Peru, in October 2020. The challenge took place virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 2 full and 8 short papers presented together with an overview paper in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected form numerous submissions. This challenge aims to evaluate and compare the current state-of-the-art methods for automatic head and neck tumor segmentation. In the context of this challenge, a dataset of 204 delineated PET/CT images was made available for training as well as 53 PET/CT images for testing. Various deep learning methods were developed by the participants with excellent results.