PROBLEMY WSPÓŁCZESNEJ NAUKI TEORIA I ZASTOSOWANIA CHALLENGING PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE THEORY AND APPLICATIONS COMPUTER SCIENCE Semantic Content of the Images Ryszard Tadeusiewicz, Marek R. Ogiela AGH University of Science and Technology, Institute of Automatics 30 Mickiewicza Ave, 30-059 Kraków, Poland 1 Introduction Images become more and more important form of information in most in- formation systems. Databases collecting first numerical data, next electronic documents and other text files, currently are full of images. The typical ex- ample can be hospital database (Fig. 1). When first computers appear in hospitals patient records was constructed from alphanumerical information only (see Fig. 1 left). Now numbers (e.g., results of laboratory examinations) and texts (e.g., anamnesis) are still present in the medical record, neverthe- less they make minority of collected information. Most medical information collected currently in patients records are of multimedia! form: medical sig- nal registrations (ECG, EEG), sometimes sounds, and most often - images. Large amount of medical imagination methods and devices result huge and permanently increasing number of images registered in medical databases. * Ł* ;0v INJ 3BB AC- SPAT. tTHEN, Ob H COMMON LAB IE. S I S * m• Bk L HE A HERA OTHER Pfc • • • • C ✓MA-1B ftCTLCOAO T IW i UA TOE ► OE SCRIP CBC UQRC ►f BUH ►DESCH]PTION ► C CPK-TOTAL ESI ► H CREATININE HEROGRAN ► !"* ELECTCSHA-tfi <IHCI PCU> M>CC BL-ST ►L CLUC<F9S> PLAT CT ► CULTURE PN-D gloc <2 hpc ) pro hue pp LOH,TOTAL »BN POTASS >9 SGOT P l L BANK *t UPTC ACID ► TE ST ■ BY « P E C ‘ H TYPE >M-Z <. --* ----- -------- --> (PICKUP) ► P I C K U P SCMCO PNURt TOMORROW •PRIORITY PREPS PSPIlC'A ,W - » u .tc » [> _ U U X .aM gM CP* TYPE ■RTRICUE sYtł-rtYr* <> ijtt if YfW* Yfttł.itóo ;V*::X < 9V iTW W « o i Fig. 1: Evolution of hospital databases form text form (left) to image form (right)