Presented at the 2000 APIII Conference Return to 2000 Abstract Index
AN INITIAL METADATA MODEL AND IT DTD / XML FOR A PATHOLOGY IMAGE DATABASE
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Fanglin Zheng
Fanglin Zheng, MSCS and John Gilbertson
Department of Pathology, Division of Pathology Informatics,
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Metadata is Data about data. It provides a means by which the multimedia semantics can be described in a structured fashion for use by many varied applications or services. In a pathology relevant context, as well as many others, this facilitates searchability, extensibility, re-usability and scalability but only where the metadata can be exchanged between systems.
Data relevant to the interpretation of a pathology image comes from both the subject and the imaging process itself. Subject information tends from a natural hierarchy that includes data at the patient, case, specimen and slide level. Image process information includes data such as resolution, color depth, etc. Based on authors' many year experiences in Medical Data Management, Pathology Informatics, and Image Processing, as well as a number of recommendations and extensions of Metadata, the initial metadata model has been deployed and has been implemented in DTD/XML, known MetaPI (Metadata for Pathology Image database) internally. MetaPI basically has the schema of what each PROJECT includes multiple CASEs; each CASE includes multiple BLOCKs; each BLOCK includes multiple SLIDEs; each SLIDE includes multiple IMAGEs; each IMAGE includes multiple FIELDs; each FIELD includes multiple POINTs. Each IMAGE is tied to an image capture CONFIGURATION that defines the way the IMAGE was captured and includes data on the microscope, camera, processing, compression and file format.
During the prototypical implementation, DTD creator, Near & Far Designer, and XML Pro are being used for the creation of XML documents.
This work* is part of Collaborative Telemicroscopy Applications Group of the HUBS (Hospitals, Universities, Businesses, and Schools) project. It is expected that the document will be reviewed, added to, improved, and shared by wide range of contributors before being published in final form.
Keywords: metadata, image, database, Pathology, XML, DTD
*This work is sponsored by DARPA HUBS F30602-00-C-0009.
