Creation and content-based retrieval in a radiological documentary record

We present a data model for managing a medical documentary record. The multimedia documents handle various type of information: medical images (X-rays, MRI, tomography...), data on the patient´s civil and clinic identity, and examination reports. A retrieval process must answer to queries involving both the explicit alphanumeric data stored in the patient´s dossier and information that are carried by the images. Content-based retrieval of medical pictures cannot be solved with a matching process based on image analysis. Thus we propose a data model for describing the semantic content of a medical picture. The image is viewed as pairs of isosemantic regions and signals in respect of an anatomic and a pathological model. This description is used to index the pictorial part of the medical record. A graphical interface is provided for the users to index the images and formulate the queries