Chapter Overview
Described here is an R&D project at the National Library of Medicine with the goal of creating systems to (a) provide the lay public images of the human anatomy, specifically high resolution color cryosections from NLM’s Visible Human Project and 3D images of anatomic structures created from these cryosections; (b) enhance text-based information services with relevant anatomic images. To accomplish these objectives, investigations into advanced techniques and technologies were conducted, including multi-tier system architectures, database design, design of suitable image viewers, image compression, and use of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), among others. This research has contributed to the design and development of AnatQuest, a system released for use by the lay public. It has also helped define the system architecture and essential functions required to link biomedical terms in documents to relevant anatomic structures in our database through UMLS concepts and relationships and to display these to the reader. In this chapter, we describe how our research has informed the overall goal to explore and implement new and visually compelling ways to bring anatomic images from the Visible Human dataset to the general public.
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Suggested Readings
Thoma, G.R., Long, L.R. (1997). “Compressing and Transmitting Visible Human Images,” IEEE MultiMedia, April-June; 4(2): 36–45.
Aronson, A.R. (2001). “Effective Mapping of Biomedical Text to the UMLS Metathesaurus: The MetaMap Program,” in Proc AMIA Symp, 2001:17–21.
Rindflesch, T.C., Aronson, A.R. (2000). “Semantic Processing for Enhanced Access to Biomedical Knowledge,” in Kashyap, V., Shklar, L. (eds.). Real World Semantic Web Applications, IOS Press, 157–72.
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Thoma, G.R. (2005). Public Access to Anatomic Images. In: Chen, H., Fuller, S.S., Friedman, C., Hersh, W. (eds) Medical Informatics. Integrated Series in Information Systems, vol 8. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-25739-X_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-25739-X_11
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