Towards Spatial Description-Based Integration of Biomedical Atlases

Biomedical imaging has become ubiquitous in both, basic research and the clinical sciences. Technology advances, and the resulting multitude of imaging modalities, have led to a sharp rise in the quantity and quality of such images. Whether for epidemiological studies, educational uses, monitoring the clinical progress of a patient or translational science purposes, being able to integrate and compare such image-based data has developed into an increasingly critical component in the Life Sciences and eHealth domain. Image processing-based solutions have difficulties when the underlying morphologies are too different. Ontology-based solutions often lack spatial precision. In this paper, we describe a compromise solution which captures location in biomedical images via spatial descriptions using so-called fiducial points. The work is discussed in the context of biomedical atlases and includes, in addition to the introduction of the basic method, some experimental performance results.