Semantic annotation of medical images

Diagnosis and treatment planning for patients can be significantly improved by comparing with clinical images of other patients with similar anatomical and pathological characteristics. This requires the images to be annotated using common vocabulary from clinical ontologies. Current approaches to such annotation are typically manual, consuming extensive clinician time, and cannot be scaled to large amounts of imaging data in hospitals. On the other hand, automated image analysis while being very scalable do not leverage standardized semantics and thus cannot be used across specific applications. In our work, we describe an automated and context-sensitive workflow based on an image parsing system complemented by an ontology-based context-sensitive annotation tool. An unique characteristic of our framework is that it brings together the diverse paradigms of machine learning based image analysis and ontology based modeling for accurate and scalable semantic image annotation.