The Image as Spatial Region: Location and Adjacency within the Radiological Image

  • Authors:

  • James M. Fielding;Dirk Marwede

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, Saarland University, Germany and Centre for the Study of Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, University of Paris I, France;Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, Saarland University, Germany and Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Leipzig University Hospital, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference (FOIS 2006)
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Biomedical ontologies define entities and relations in order to represent knowledge in the biomedical domain. In this paper we concentrate on the domain of medical imaging. In previous work, we analyzed a representative sample of computed tomography reports in order to determine to which entities and relations the terms used in such reports refer (with regard to the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) and the recently published Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Relation Ontology, respectively) in order to construct an imaging ontology for electronic reporting in radiology. In this paper we expand the role of two OBO relations in particular, as they may be applied to radiological image information: the relations located_in and adjacent_to. Defining these relations in terms of the basic topological relations of Region Connection Calculus (RCC), we show how the qualitative description of image feature locations in radiological reporting may be formalized for reasoning.