Towards the Ontology-based Classification of Lymphoma Patients using Semantic Image Annotations

Today, clinicians rely on medical images for screening, diagnosis, treatment planning and follow up, but still a generic and flexible medical image understanding is missing. Although, there exist several approaches for semantic image annotation, those approaches do not make use of practical clinical knowledge, such as best practice solutions or clinical guidelines. Our final goal is to enhance medical image annotations by integrating clinical knowledge, such as lymphoma staging systems. The contribution of this paper is to introduce a formal approach to the classification of patients in well-defined categories. As first step, we have developed an OWL DL ontology representing the Ann-Arbor Lymphoma staging system that is suitable for performing automatic patient classification. Our aim for the ontology design was to establish means for automatic staging that maps each patient to one staging degree.