1. A method for processing and orientating radiology chest and abdominal images comprising the steps of: a) optically reading radiology data to produce a digital data image; b) providing a spatial--variant image segmentation of the digital image; c) determining from the digital image size whether the image is a chest image or an abdominal image; d) for a chest image, determining from the boundaries of the image whether the image is a front chest image or a side chest image; e) for a side chest image, determining the orientation of the side chest image based on the slopes of the boundaries of the side chest image; and f) for a front chest image, determining the orientation of front chest image based on the percentage of bright pixels on each side of the front chest image.