Medical imaging markup environment

Abstract

A new world of digital diagnostic capabilities has been made possible with the recent advances in medical imaging technology. These advances promoted communication and cooperation between several distinct entities to create standards and models that can be used in the entire industry to improve the quality of the service offered to users. Despite the growing quality in digital images, they are not enough alone. That is, it is required that clinical reports, containing medical opinions about specific traits found in the obtained images, are analysed. These structured reports comprise mostly free text annotations that have not been explored yet. Therefore, the development of an environment for the management of structured reports and image annotations is a crucial step in the process of improving medical imaging technologies and services. In this paper, we present a prototype solution for such environment, based on ongoing research conducted by the caBIG AIM workgroup.