Summary
Objectives The objective of this article is to provide an overview of current trends in medical
multimedia retrieval. This state of the art is then compared with trends and techniques
in the Web 2.0 field that addresses several of the problems of current multimedia
retrieval and may help in solving them.
MethodsThe article uses a review of the current literature on medical imaging and medical
multimedia retrieval from the Pubmed and Google scholar literature search engines.
Other sources include popular Web 2.0 web pages and articles on Web 2.0 describing
the main concepts of these technologies in the medical domain.
Results Web 2.0 has significantly changed the way we interact with the Internet and has created
an important added-value by promoting activities of users and interactions between
users. In the medical field, there are many examples of adoption of these methods
and multimedia retrieval can play an important role in this field by supplying the
right data at the right time.
Conclusions Medical multimedia retrieval still has a long way to go to become an everyday tool
in the medical field and in clinical practice. Still, when reusing and linking much
of the electronic patient record’s data, image retrieval can be a technology to help
extract important knowledge and navigate through the large amounts of data. Key challenges
for more widespread adoption of these technologies involve legal rules for secondary
use of medical data because currently only very few image data sets with ground truth
have been made available.
Keywords
Medical image retrieval - medical multimedia data - visual information search - Web
2.0