Ontology-Based Medical Image Annotation with Description Logics

The interpretation of medical evidence is normally presented in terms of a controlled, but diversely expressed specialist vocabulary and natural language phrases. Such informally expressed data require human intervention to ascertain its relevance in any specific case. In order to facilitate machine-based reasoning about the evidence gathered, additional interpretive semantics must be attached to the data; a shift from a merely data-intensive approach to a semantics-rich model of evidence. In this paper, we present a system to formally annotate medical images captured to aid the diagnosis and management of breast cancer, that enables a series of semantics-based operations to be performed. Our approach is grounded upon an imaging ontology specifying the domain knowledge and a Description Logic (DL) taxonomic inferential engine responsible for semantics-based reasoning and image retrieval.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICTAI
• Authors: Bo Hu, Srinandan Dasmahapatra, Paul H. Lewis, Nigel Shadbolt
• Keywords: Additional Interpretive Semantics, Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 2003, Medical Evidence, Semantics-based Reasoning