The futures of medical imaging

Medical imaging is a very dynamic field and corresponds to a young scientific discipline which is at the crossroad of various areas. The first advances in this field were pushed by fundamental discoveries in physics which, added to the engineering contribution, has given raise to the development of technologies that have had and still have a major impact in clinics. In parallel, chemistry has also profoundly contributed to the improvement of the performances of medical imaging systems in terms of sensitivity and specificity. Biology can be seen as another important area that interacts with medical imaging, and the genomics revolution poses new questions to biomedical image engineering. Many theoretical problems, among which inverse problems are the most frequent in the imaging community, have been solved thanks to applied mathematics. Last, information and communication technology is an active engineering area which at the origin of numerous technical achievements in medical imaging. After the analysis of the background of medical imaging, this talk will survey the recent evolution and breakthroughs in medical imaging field and try to highlight some prospective areas that future research may explore in the next decade.