Organizing Knowledge in a Semantic Web for Pathology

Digital pathology and telepathology allow an extended usage of electronic images for diagnostics, support or educational purposes in anatomical or clinical pathology. Current approaches have not found wide acceptance in routine pathology, mainly due to limitations of image retrieval. In this paper we propose a semantic retrieval system for the pathology domain. The system combines text and image information and offers advanced content-based retrieval services for diagnosis, differential diagnosis and teaching tasks. At the core of the system is a Semantic Web gathering both ontological domain knowledge, and rules describing key tasks and processes in pathology.