Towards spatial description-based integration of biomedical atlases

Abstract

Biomedical imaging has become ubiquitous in both, basic research and the clinical sciences. Technology advances, and the resulting multitude of imaging modalities, have led to a sharp rise in the quantity and quality of such images. Whether for epidemiological studies, educational uses, monitoring the clinical progress of a patient or translational science purposes, being able to integrate and compare such image-based data has developed into an increasingly critical component in the Life Sciences and eHealth domain. Image processing-based solutions have difficulties when the underlying morphologies are too different. Ontology-based solutions often lack spatial precision. In this paper, we describe a compromise solution which captures location in biomedical images via spatial descriptions using so-called fiducial points. The work is discussed in the context of biomedical atlases and includes, in addition to the introduction of the basic method, some experimental performance results. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.