The Radiological Image as Spatial Region: Location and Adjacency of Image Entities
James M. Fielding and Dirk Marwede
International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006)
Baltimore, Maryland (USA), November 9-11, 2006
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 Ontologies (OBO) Relations Ontology, respectively). Based on the OBO Relations Ontology, we outlined a set of additional primitive relations for image features like shape, morphology, size and signal frequently found in our report sample. 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-Connected Calculus (RCC), we show how the qualitative description of image feature locations in radiological reporting may be formalized for reasoning.