An information gathering system for medical image inspection.

Young-Jin Lee and P. Bajcsy

Proceedings of the SPIE - Proceedings of SPIE Conference on Medical Imaging v5748, p383-90, 12-17 February 2005, San Diego, CA.

We present an information gathering system for medical image inspection that consists of software tools for capturing computer-centric and human-centric information. Computer-centric information includes (1) static annotations, such as (a) image drawings enclosing any selected area, a set of areas with similar colors, a set of salient points, and (b) textual descriptions associated with either image drawings or links between pairs of image drawings, and (2) dynamic (or temporal) information, such as mouse movements, zoom level changes, image panning and frame selections from an image stack. Human-centric information is represented by video and audio signals that are acquired by computermounted cameras and microphones. The short-term goal of the presented system is to facilitate learning of medical novices from medical experts, while the long-term goal is to data mine all information about image inspection for assisting in making diagnoses.

In this work, we built basic software functionality for gathering computer-centric and human-centric information of the aforementioned variables. Next, we developed the information playback capabilities of all gathered information for educational purposes. Finally, we prototyped text-based and image template-based search engines to retrieve information from recorded annotations, for example, (a) find all annotations containing the word "blood vessels", or (b) search for similar areas to a selected image area. The information gathering system for medical image inspection reported here has been tested with images from the Histology Atlas1,2 database.

Keywords: Expert knowledge, computer-centric information, human-centric information, visual annotations, audio/video signal processing, semantic gap, content-based medical image retrieval system