Although this article concentrates on image analysis and computer vision, image synthesis is in many respects linked to these disciplines (23,24). The most immediate example is the data visualization itself. The physician’s workstation will foremost be a display device, showing the results from the reconstruction and/or analysis. In addition to this obvious ex- ample, various concepts “borrowed” from computer graphics are often employed in scene analysis. The opposite is of course true, but of less interest in the context of this paper. The common basis for image synthesis and analysis lies in the way humans visually per- ceive things. Computer graphics is obviously intimately concerned with perception
