Sharing Medical Images: a Proposal of a Reference Image Database

摘要

Due to increasing number of digital images used in medical diagnosis, the image processing and analysis are becoming essential for many tasks in Medicine. One of the obstacles within the field of medical image processing is the lack of reference image datasets freely available for groups and/or individual users, in order to evaluate their new methods and applications. In order to improve this situation, this work presents the development of a framework to make available a free, online, multipurpose and multimodality medical image database for software and algorithm evaluation. The project is implemented as a distributed architecture for medical image database including a publishing workflow, authoring tools, and role-based access control. Our effort aims to offer a testbed and a set of resources including software, links to scientific papers, gold standards, reference and post-processed images, enabling the medical image processing community (scientists, physicians, students and industrials) to be more aware of evaluation issues. The proposed approach has been used as an electronic teaching system in Radiology as well.