Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

Multimedia Medical Databases
Liana Stanescu, Dumitru Dan Burdescu, and Marius Brezovan
University of Craiova, Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics,
Software Engineering Department
stanescu@software.ucv.ro, burdescu@software.ucv.ro,
brezovan_marius@software.ucv.ro
1 General Overview
Nowadays there is an explosion of multimedia information. A huge quantity of
static and video images has been stored on the Internet. A large number of images
stored on different media were converted to digital format. For example, TV images
and newspapers have been converted to digital form, making an easy task
their processing, distribution and storage.
More than 2700 digital pictures are made in every second (in total 85 billion
images yearly). For example, PhotoWorks includes tens of millions of images on
its web site. The common images are completed by special purpose images, like
medical images with an estimation of 2 billion per year.
The number of images will be increasing because of the tendency for digital
(television, movies) and because everybody will have access to everything. The
world production of digital information in 2007 is estimated to be more than 109
GB (250 MB for each man on the planet). It is estimated that in the next 10 years,
each of us will manipulate terabytes of information (video, static images, music,
photos and documents) every day.
In the medical domain, in the diagnosis, treatment and research processes,
traditional alphanumerical information (patient personal data, diagnosis, results for
the analysis and investigations) and a large quantity of images are accumulated.
The tendency is to digitalize the images. In present there are used a large variety
of digital image modalities: film scanners, computed tomography (CT), positron
emission tomography (PET), single positron emission computed tomography
(SPECT), ultrasounds, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), digital subtraction
angiography (DSA) and magnetic source imaging (MSI) [105].
It is considered that the cardiology and radiology are the medical domains that
produce the highest number of images. Also the endoscope images are produced
in significant quantities. For example, the University Hospital of Geneva gathers
more than 13.000 images daily, from more than 30 types of medical devices.
Besides that, there are many other images stored on other media. But the largest
volume of image data is produced in the hospitals from the United States where
digital images represent 30% and the other 70% represent images acquired in
A.S. Sidhu et al. (Eds.): Biomedical Data and Applications, SCI 224, pp. 71–141.
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