Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13
Accessing and Representing Knowledge
in the Medical Field: Visual
and Lexical Modalities
Imon Banerjee, Chiara Eva Catalano, Francesco Robbiano
and Michela Spagnuolo
13.1 Introduction
One of the challenging directions of the research in modern medicine is modeling
a
digital patient
, i.e. a digital counterpart that should represent and abstract the real
patient in all his/her medically relevant aspects. The digital patient is nowadays a
realistic vision: we witness a huge flow of data every day, either born-digital or easy
to digitize. This flow is constituted by numerical measurements (lab data, bedside
measurements, home instrumentation), recorded information (family history, patient
medical history, current complaints, symptoms), signals (ECG, EEG, EMG), images
(X-ray,MRI, CT, Ultrasound), physical examinations, and narrative text (e.g. doctor's
notes, discharge summaries) [
1
].
Given this variety of sources (see Fig.
13.1
), digital healthcare needs a multi-
modal and combined access to interrelated heterogeneous information in addition
to traditional sources: books, posters and 3D physical mock-ups are used to convey
medical knowledge but their support is no longer suitable for the new technological
challenges.
In the digital era such pieces of knowledge are evenmore valuable when integrated
or at least interconnected so that doctors and professionals in the field are able to
navigate data more easily and directly gather all the relevant information available.
