Making medical visual information available on the WEB

Abstract

This paper presents a new metadata model to describe and retrieve medical visual information, such images and their diagnoses, using the Web. The classes of this model allow describing medical images of different medical areas, including their properties, components and relationships. This model supports the international classification of diseases and related health problems (i.e. ICD-10) [1]. The MedISeek (Medical Image Seek) prototype presented here proposes a medical image sharing system based on web services, that allows authorized users to describe, store and retrieve medical images and their associated diagnostic information,based on the proposed metadata model. Thus, this paper proposes to include the image description, converted to RDF syntax, into a JPEG image and a persistent structure for relational databases to storage and retrieve this metadata, providing fast indexing and querying. A description of the prototype structure also is provided