Quantitative tool design using tomographic brain image processing from SPECT to support psychiatric diagnosis

Considering the advance in the knowledge of the psychiatric disease's physiopathology and its treatment, it becomes necessary the use of image processing algorithms in order to help the psychiatric diagnosis and to monitor the therapy. It is not but until the appearance of neuroimaging equipment that this branch of medicine "counts on" a support in engineering, emphasizing the technique of functional brain imaging in the neurological and psychiatric analysis. The purpose of this investigation is to create a tool composed by an image processing system, a dynamic information database and algorithms of comparative analysis, based on SPECT technology. The use of this tool allows to identify and compare common patterns and to obtain incidence levels in a quantitative form. © 2006 IEEE.