Engineering a domain ontology in a semantic web retrieval system for pathology

Abstract

Telepathology allows pathologists to acquire, analyze and exchange high quality digital histological images for diagnostic and teaching purposes. Concrete applications in this area have the essential drawback that they restrict their retrieval capabilities to automatic picture analysis, ignoring corresponding medical reports. In this paper we propose a Semantic Web based retrieval system, which uses domain ontologies and a rule engine, as well as ontology-driven NLP algorithms to overcome these deficiencies.