Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive overview of medical image analysis. Practical in approach, the text is uniquely structured by potential applications. Features: presents learning objectives, exercises and concluding remarks in each chapter, in addition to a glossary of abbreviations; describes a range of common imaging techniques, reconstruction techniques and image artefacts; discusses the archival and transfer of images, including the HL7 and DICOM standards; presents a selection of techniques for the enhancement of contrast and edges, for noise reduction and for edge-preserving smoothing; examines various feature detection and segmentation techniques, together with methods for computing a registration or normalisation transformation; explores object detection, as well as classification based on segment attributes such as shape and appearance; reviews the validation of an analysis method; includes appendices on Markov random field optimization, variational calculus and principal component analysis.