Abstract: Large scale feature searches of accumulated collections of medical imagery are required for multiple purposes, including clinical studies, administrative planning, epidemiology, teaching, quality improvement, and research. To perform a feature search of large collections of medical imagery, one can either search text descriptors of the imagery in the collection (usually the interpretation), or (if the imagery is in digital format) the imagery itself. At our institution, text interpretations of medical imagery are all available in our VA Hospital Information System. These are downloaded daily into an off-line computer. The text descriptors of most medical imagery are usually formatted as free text, and so require a user friendly database search tool to make searches quick and easy for any user to design and execute. We are tailoring such a database search tool (Liveview), developed by one of the authors (Karshat). To further facilitate search construction, we are constructing (from our accumulated interpretation data) a dictionary of medical and radiological terms and synonyms. If the imagery database is digital, the imagery which the search discovers is easily retrieved from the computer archive. We describe our database search user interface, with examples, and compare the efficacy of computer assisted imagery searches from a clinical text database with manual searches. Our initial work on direct feature searches of digital medical imagery is outlined. !0
展开▼
