Accessing and Representing Knowledge in the Medical Field: Visual and Lexical Modalities

In the era of digitalization a large amount of medical data is produced, and many activities spanning from diagnosis to simulation and from assisted surgery to patient-specific treatment and follow-up are carried out with the support of software tools. Computer-aided medicine can undoubtedly take advantage of a structured organization of the digital data involved, through the aid of knowledge and visualization technologies. In this chapter, we will survey recent approaches to the access and presentation of medical data in order to exemplify how knowledge-driven data organization may support medical activities. These approaches will be analyzed paying special attention to two different trends: we will show their potential in providing a visual effective reference and their capability of exploiting shared and structured vocabularies. Perspectives on the integration of these two trends will also be presented.