Facilitating multi-disciplinary knowledge-based support for breast cancer screening

Dasmahapatra, S., Dupplaw, D., Hu, B., Lewis, H., Lewis, P. and Shadbolt, N. (2006) Facilitating multi-disciplinary knowledge-based support for breast cancer screening. International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management, 7 (5). pp. 403-420. ISSN 1368-2156

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Abstract

In order to increase the accuracy of breast cancer screening,
the diagnostics of imaging modalities (X-ray, ultrasound or magnetic
resonance(MR)) is assessed alongside results of histopathological or
cytopathological studies as well as clinical information about a patient.
This procedure is called ``triple assessment'' in the UK. We have
undertaken a project to develop a multiple-ontology based medical
image-annotation and reasoning system to support this procedure. Our
system integrates image-annotation tools for drawing, image analysis and
feature extraction, with ontologies compliant with the proposed
language standard, namely OWL. This integration is carried out by the
mapping between images and instances in the ontologies. In this paper,
we outline the ambit of the project in further detail and discuss
some of the architecture and design issues that we have resolved in
order to make our system modular and semantic web-enabled. The
resulting knowledge base should not only support medical practitioners
in the triple assessment process but also provide a resource from
which personalised patient information could be delivered via the web
direct to patient or carer. Finally, we describe the progress that we
have made thus far on the implementation of this system.