ERCIM News No.25 - April 1996 - FORTH
Content-based Image Similarity Search on the Web
by Stelios Orphanoudakis and Catherine Chronaki
The World Wide Web is currently enjoying great popularity due to its
visual nature and information retrieval capabilities. In this vast, dynamic
information infrastructure, medical information systems, which support content-based
similarity queries and other advanced browsing and navigation capabilities,
are likely to play an increasingly important role in medical training, research,
and clinical decision making.
I2Cnet is an ongoing project at ICS-FORTH, whose goal is to provide network-transparent
content-based access to geographically distributed repositories of medical
images. Each medical image repository is managed by an I2C server. Through
a standard web browser, users may request services related to the content-based
management of images. Network-transparency is facilitated by I2C service
brokers, which maintain a directory of the services available throughout
I2Cnet. Available services include various classes of images, image posting
(ie making an image available for description), and image analysis. Based
on profiles of the available services, service brokers select an appropriate
subset of the I2C servers, effectively translating the network-transparent
query into a server-specific one.
In the case of content-based image similarity queries, the user interacts
with web pages (effectively filling HTML forms) and then browses the retrieved
images. These pages may be of arbitrary complexity, containing HTML forms
with embedded script language and/or applets, and cater to advanced user
interaction. Thus, a user formulating a service request to I2Cnet will be
able to drag and drop an image, a sketch, or even a voice recording into
an HTML form. For example, a physician confronted with a difficult case
may retrieve images similar to the images in an electronic patient record
by dragging them into their favorite query page. Furthermore, the same interface
will enable authorized users connected to the health care network to interoperate
with dedicated medical information systems. The resulting service request
is then forwarded to a subset of the available I2C servers.
The response of I2Cnet to a network-transparent query consists of the responses
provided by the servers to which the query was forwarded. To improve the
overall quality of the provided services, the user is prompted to provide
feedback on the quality of these services. This permits I2Cnet to evolve
intelligently, since fast servers with rich data description repositories
and accurate responses are likely to be used more frequently in network-transparent
queries, while slow servers with unreliable services become obsolete. User
feedback is taken into account in the profiles maintained by the service
broker and affects its future behavior with respect to the way the queries
are resolved. Service brokers maintain a directory of available services
throughout I2Cnet, "server profiles" which reflect overall server
performance, "user profiles" which reflect user preferences and
information on the client platform, and "service profiles" which
reflect the availability and quality of particular I2C services.
The implementation of I2Cnet is currently in progress and we expect that
this new service will soon be available on the web.
For additional information on this activity, visit: http://www.ics.forth.gr/~telemed/i2cnet.html
Please contact:
Stelios Orphanoudakis - ICS-FORTH
Tel: +30 81 391601
E-mail: orphanou@ics.forth.gr
or
Catherine Chronaki - ICS-FORTH
Tel: +30 81 391691
E-mail: chronaki@ics.forth.gr
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