An ontology service to support medical image labeling

In the past, the Semantic Web technologies have just been utilized to overcome some important challenges in different fields, such as knowledge and content management, electronic commerce, and so on. We think these technologies can be also utilized in the context of medical imaging. Medical images can nowadays be automatically segmented but a semantic identification of their parts remains an open question. We think a homogeneous approach based on the integration of OWL ontologies and SWRL rules can be applied to model medical knowledge and, as a result, to label medical images. Following this idea, we have designed and developed an ontology-based service that i) exploits and integrates OWL ontologies and SWRL rules in a homogenous system, ii) performs logic and reasoning mechanisms to enable automated labeling procedures. Finally, as an application, we have used the Ontology Service to label human brain images.