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Knowledge Base
In collaboration with researchers in the departments
of Computer Science and Medical Informatics at Columbia we have begun developing
an ontology to address the need to effectively navigate large image bases
to retrieve images for study or teaching [1]
[6]
[7].
The ontology also serves as a bridge between images and text, such as that
found in a syllabus or lecture notes for the anatomy course [Figure
8].
The usefulness of life-like 3D anatomical
images that can be browsed and interactively viewed from arbitrary
perspectives is widely recognized. However, our experience with these
images has shown that it is not possible to navigate collections
of these images by 'point and click' techniques alone, both because of
the large number of anatomical structures and substructures, and because
of the intricate inter-relationships among these structures. For
many applications, 3D images alone are not enough; these images must be
associated with video and audio material, 2D images, explanatory text and
reference material. An important goal for the Vesalius Project is to organize
the 3D images in a flexible and re-usable knowledge base that supports
searching across the image 'gallery' and also serves as the structured
repository for a variety of information associated with these images.
The knowledge base will specifically be designed to support a wide spectrum
of applications that use, extend and/or filter this information.
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