Semantic support for medical image search and retrieval

The need for annotating digital image data is recognised in a variety of different medical information systems, covering both professional and educational usage of medical imaging. Due to the high recall and low precision attribute of keyword-based search, multimedia information search and retrieval based on textual descriptions is not always an efficient and sufficient solution, particularly for specific applications such as the medical diagnosis information systems. On the other hand, using image processing techniques to provide search on the content specific data for multimedia information is not a trivial task. In this paper we use the semantic web technologies in medical image search and retrieval process for a medical imaging information system. We employ an ontology-based knowledge representation and semantic annotation for medical image data. The proposed system defines data representation structures which are given well-defined meanings. The meanings are machine-accessible contents which could be interpreted by the software agents to find and retrieve the information based on the standard vocabularies and meaningful relationships between the data items.