Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

134 L. Stanescu, D. Dan Burdescu, and M. Brezovan
6 Conclusions
The chapter presents a series of aspects in the field of multimedia medical databases.
These databases are the result of structuring the alphanumeric and imagistic data
gathered in large quantities in the patient investigation and diagnosis processes.
We have also presented the necessity of creating and managing the multimedia
medical databases and the advantages of using these operations in order to increase
medical act efficiency.
A big part of medical data is stored in DICOM files that can’t be seen directly
on a computer. As a result, we have given attention to this problem by presenting
ours original algorithms for extracting the alphanumeric and imagistic data from
this type of files in order to be integrated in the multimedia medical databases.
Also, the problem of DICOM viewers has been presented. These tools have the
ability to display and apply certain operations on the information from DICOM
files, being very useful in the medical activity.
Taking into consideration that a database is created for querying and obtaining
with accuracy and speed the information requested by the user, the chapter treats
in great detail the problem of content-based visual query. This type of query is
applied on multimedia databases and can be combined with text-based simple
query.
As a rule, the content-based visual query takes into consideration the primitive
characteristics automatically extracted from images: color, texture or shape.
We have presented in detail the notion of color and algorithms for automated
extraction of the gray-level or color information from medical images and also
aspects of color texture characteristics extracting, algorithms and experiments on
color images from digestive area.
Another important aspect in medical applications is the automated segmentation
of images. For segmenting the color images from digestive area, we have implemented
the color set back-projection algorithm. The chapter presents in detail
ours original implementations of this method and the results of the content-based
region query on color, size and spatial extent on a database with color medical
images.
The presented experiments have been realized with the help of MIR (Medical
Image Retrieval) – a software tool for creating, managing and content-based visual
querying of the multimedia medical databases with color images from the digestive
area.
These experiments were realized along with medical experts from the two biggest
university hospitals from Craiova and with financial support from Romanian
Academy and National University Research Council.
In the content-based visual query of the medical databases and automated segmentation
of medical images areas, there are wide researches, a big variety of
techniques applied on various imaging modalities, taking into consideration many
systems of the human body and pathologies.