Interactive decision-making for picture processing

Pictorial data forms an integral part of most patient records. Such data take the form of radiographs, blood smears, cervical smears, sonograms, chromosome karyotypes, etc. It is in the long range interest of biomedicine to encourage the development of programming systems and languages oriented toward the scientist-user who engages in the analysis (on-going theory) of such data (on-going observation) as well as toward his scientific subject. PEEP, a collection of picture editing and evaluation procedures, is such a conversational, interactive yet rapidly extensible programming system. It deals with digitized images with respect to global scene analysis, local scene analysis, feature and relationship extraction, feature selection, and classification. PEEP is habitable in scope, civilized in use, and rapidly expandable and extensible. It is meeting the demands of several picture processing applications to white blood cells, tissue characterization, aspiration biopsies and computerized tomography brain scans.