Medical Imaging on the Semantic Web: Annotation and Image Markup

D. L. Rubin, P. Mongkolwat, V. Kleper, K. S. Supekar, D. S. Channin. AAAI Spring SymposiumSeries, Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, Stanford. March, 2008.

While Semantic Web technologies are showing promise in tackling the information challenges in biomedicine, less attention is focused on leveraging similar technologies in imaging. We are developing methods and tools to enable the transparent discovery and use of large distributed collections of medical images in cyberspace as well as within hospital information systems. Our approach is to make the human and machine descriptions of image pixel content machine-accessible through annotation using ontologies. We created an ontology of image annotation and markup, specifying the entities and relations necessary to represent the semantics of medical image pixel content. We are creating a toolkit to collect the annotations directly from researchers and physicians as they view the images on medical imaging workstations.