
2
Elements of decision theory
2.1 INTRODUCTION
The ultimate goal of medical imag ing is to answer a clinically relevant ques-
tions about the disease status of patients. As an example, one of the frequent
tasks is to determine if a patient who undergoes medical imaging procedure s
has cancer or not. For this decision problem ther e a re two possible outcomes:
cancer present or not. Another common task is to determine the concentration
of a tracer in the orga n of interest. For this case there is usua lly an infinite
number of outco mes a s the concentration is a continuous variable. Another
task may be to determine if the concentration of tracer changes ...