The Metamap Process: A New Approach To The Creation Of Object Oriented Image Databases For Medical Education

Abstract

The MetaMap process is particularly suited for representing and linking spatial and textual information in the development of interactive applications which must access large databases of 2-D and 3-D raster images. This pmcess has pen particularly effective for the development of multimedia educational programs for medical education, such as interactive atlases for the anatomical sciences. MetaMapping allows a user to obtain descriptive information concerning a feature of a displayed image by pointing to the location of the feature. Conversely, the user may enter descriptive textual information, and the locations of the responsive features are indicated. The data processing and memory storage requirements are minimized by encoding information about the image as a pixelhroxel bit map, and a color map in which the addresses or indices of the color map are correlated with the addresses or pointers to strings of descriptive information concerning image features. For a spmfied color map address, the corresponding set of features and their pointers can be found by comparing the specified color map address to the limits of the color map address ranges for the various features. This interface allows hypermedia-type linking of image features to relevant multimedia objects such as text, images, sounds, and animations. Computational efficiency is maximized so that effective multimedia systems can be developed on low-end microprocessor platforms such as Intel 8088 or -based systems. The method and apparatus for implementing the MetaMap process is protected by U.S. Patent #4,847,604 [2].