[MM] Use case: bio-medical images

Dear all,
I'm reading the working draft on Image Annotation on the Semantic  
Web, and I notice that the biomedical images use case is missing.

May I try to provide one? Here a possible draft:

An healthcare provider might be interested in annotating medical  
images for at least two reasons: clinical applications and education.  
First of all, diagnostic images involved in patient care need to be  
properly annotated from different points of view: the image modality,  
i.e., the image source (radiograph, MRI, etc) and its acquisition  
parameters (including time), the patient to which the image refer and  
eventually the anatomical site, and finally, report data, i.e.,  
diagnosis and related information. For some medical specialty, this  
is actually done through image formats able to carry such metadata,  
like DICOM for radiology. Furthermore, in medicine and healthcare  
many simple ontologies already exists, in the form of terminologies  
and classifications (like ICD9, MeSH, SNOMED).
Images are however useful also for medical education. In this case,  
patient data are no more needed, or, more strictly, anonymisation is  
needed in order not to reveal personal data to unauthorized users.  
This can be obtained by forcing restrictions based on usage.  
Educational images need a clear description of modality, anatomical  
site, and morphological and diagnostic comments.  Such metadata may  
refer to the complete image or, often, to just one or more subparts,  
which need to be identified in some way. Educational metadata could  
be directly shown to users or maintained hidden to develop self- 
learning skills.

Let me know if this could be useful. I can also provide a solution  
draft starting from this abstract:
http://www.mednet2002.org/abstracts/display.cfm?id=686642601

Kind regards,
Vincenzo Della Mea

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-----------------------------  Vincenzo Della Mea, PhD  
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------------ Medical Informatics, Telemedicine and e-health Lab  
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Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science - University of Udine, Italy
-----------------------  http://www.dimi.uniud.it/dellamea/  
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------------------------------- http://mitel.dimi.uniud.it  
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