Semantic Analysis on Medical Images: A Case Study

Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems, as second-opinion assistance to radiologists, are being developed. However, the lack of semantic information at the image processing stage is expected to limit the ultimate performance of such CAD systems. A solution can be provided by a specific medical domain terminology, which contains several concepts that describe features of abnormalities and the relationships (properties) between these concepts; as such is well readable by both human beings (radiologists) and machine agents (CAD systems). Here we investigate a specific ontology and provide a clear evaluation based on string and Description Logic (DL). The results provide a clear understanding of semantic medical image analysis with which CAD systems are expected to improve their performance.