SWAT4LS2009 – Sonja Zillner: Towards the Ontology Based Classification of Lymphoma Patients using Semantic Image Annotation

(Again, these are notes as the talk happens)

This has to do with the Siemens Project Theseus Medico – Semantic Medical Image Understanding (towards flexible and scalable access to medical images)

Different images from many different sources: e.g. X-ray, MRI etc…use this and combine with treatment plans, patient data etc and integrate with external knowledge sources.

Example Clinical Query:” Show me theCT scans and records of patiens with a Lymph Node enlargement in the neck area” – at the moment query over several disjoint systems is required

Current Motivation: generic and flexible understanding of images is missing
Final Goal: Enhance medical image annotations by integrating clinical data with images
This talk: introduce a formal classification system for patients (ontological model)

Used Knowledge Sources:

• Ann-Arbor Staging System – particularly suitable for lymphoma patients
• RadLex
• Foundational Model of Anatomy
• Semantic Image Annotation

Requirements of the Ontological Model

• Capture the rationale of the Ann Arbor Staging system
• Integrate external ontologies
• Ontology must describe the patient record

Now showing an example axiomatisation for the counting and location of lymphatic occurences and discussses problems relating to extending existing ontologies….

Now talking about annotating patient records: typical problems are abbreviations, clinical codes, fragments of sentences etc…difficult for NLP people to deal with….

Now showing detailed patient example where application of their classification system led to reclassification of patient in terms of staging system.