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Applications of digital image processing in medicine have grown in the past five years at a tremendous rate. Many hardware systems have been developed by research groups as well as by commercial manufacturers. During the initial phase of evolution efforts were mainly focused on the development of new hardware systems, which were run using existing system and application programming technologies. As early as 19741 it was recognized in our working group that image processing systems required specially tailored software environments which offer fast, flexible and interactive access to the new types of data objects (e.g. images, image sequences) and the operations defined on them. We, therefore, developed an experimental tool for the generation of interactive image processing systems XDL2'3 with which the arising problems could be studied. In 1977 we felt the need for having a production version of a dialog system for our applications in medical image sequence processing4,5. We decided to design and implement a compact image processing tool parallel to the ongoing research on the experimental system 6 . This language called PROFI-11 (Processing and Retrieval of Functional Images) has been in routine operation since the end of 1977. The requirements, the language features and the experiences gained in four years operation are described in this paper. Recently several image processing languages have been described which are essentially extensions of existing languages'. With PROFI-11 we have choosen a different approach, as will be seen from the following sections.
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