Fast and Effective Quantification of Symmetry in Medical Images for Pathology Detection: Application to Chest Radiography

Abstract

Purpose
Symmetry is an important feature of human anatomy and the absence of symmetry in medical images can indicate the presence of pathology. Quantification of image symmetry can then be used to improve the automatic analysis of medical images.

Conclusions
We conclude that the proposed algorithm for symmetry computation provides informative features which can be used to improve abnormality detection in medical images both at a local and a global level.