Publication
Medical Image Understanding Through the Integration of Cross-Modal Object Recognition with Formal Domain Knowledge
Manuel Möller; Michael Sintek; Paul Buitelaar; Saikat Mukherjee; Xiang Sean Zhou; Jörg Freund
In: International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF-2008) as Part of (BIOSTEC-2008), January 28-31, Funchal, Portugal. International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF), Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, Pages 134-141, Vol. 1, Springer, 1/2008.
Abstract
Rapid advances in medical imaging scanner technology have increased dramatically in the last decade the
amount of medical image data generated every day. By contrast, the software technology that would allow
the efficient exploitation of the highly informational content of medical images has evolved much slower.
Despite the research outcomes in image understanding and semantic modeling, current image databases are
still indexed by keywords assigned by humans and not by the image content. The reason for this slow progress
is the lack of scalable and generic information representations capable of overcoming the high-dimensional
nature of image data. Indeed, most of the current content-based image search applications are focused on the
indexing of certain image features that do not generalize well and use inflexible queries. We propose a system
combining medical imaging information with semantic background knowledge from formalized ontologies,
that provides a basis for building universal knowledge repositories, giving clinicians a fully cross-lingual and
cross-modal access to biomedical information of all forms.