Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Improving Clean Water Conservation in Western Ethiopia Using ArcGIS Server

A Web map application was developed to disseminate information on the locations of freshwater springs and their status in Western Ethiopia. Ethiopia suffers an insufficient clean water supply. Only one-third of the rural population has access to safe drinking water. Various organizations have been involved in protecting water springs, but these efforts were not well coordinated due to the lack of spatial information about the locations of springs and their status in the area of intervention. The Tropical Health Alliance Foundation (THAF) is one of the organizations that have been committing its efforts and funds to protect springs in Western Ethiopia. THAF identified the need to improve communication by virtue of a Web-based interactive mapping in order to help coordinate interventions and attract more funds from various donors by providing better information shared over the Web. A Web GIS application proves to be an effective tool for ensuring water security for Ethiopia in the coming years

Big Data and Regional Science: Opportunities, Challenges, and Directions for Future Research

Recent technological, social, and economic trends and transformations are contributing to the production of what is usually referred to as Big Data. Big Data, which is typically defined by four dimensions -- Volume, Velocity, Veracity, and Variety -- changes the methods and tactics for using, analyzing, and interpreting data, requiring new approaches for data provenance, data processing, data analysis and modeling, and knowledge representation. The use and analysis of Big Data involves several distinct stages from "data acquisition and recording" over "information extraction" and "data integration" to "data modeling and analysis" and "interpretation", each of which introduces challenges that need to be addressed. There also are cross-cutting challenges, which are common challenges that underlie many, sometimes all, of the stages of the data analysis pipeline. These relate to "heterogeneity", "uncertainty", "scale", "timeliness", "privacy" and "human interaction". Using the Big Data analysis pipeline as a guiding framework, this paper examines the challenges arising in the use of Big Data in regional science. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future activities to realize the possibilities and potential for Big Data in regional science.Series: Working Papers in Regional Scienc

Turning data into information: assessing and reporting GIS metadata integrity using integrated computing technologies

A Geographic Information System (GIS) serves as the tangible and intangible means by which spatially related phenomena can be created, analyzed and rendered. GIS metadata serves as the formal framework to catalog information about a GIS data set. Metadata is independent of the encoded spatial and attribute information. GIS metadata is a subset of electronic metadata which catalogs electronic resources such as web pages and software applications. However, GIS metadata is inherently different than electronic media because each metadata file can be applied to a spatial component that is not implicit with other forms of metadata. Using open source technologies such as R, Perl and PHP, metadata information for large GIS data sets (thousands of layers) can be gleaned quickly and more efficiently than the human element. In doing so, metrics to express the integrity of both the metadata and GIS data can be captured, displayed and compared for use in the decision making process. Supervised and unsupervised techniques allow users and computer algorithms to explore unseen trends about the GIS data not obvious to the human component. The validity of these analyses was tested using a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Responses from 40 GIS professionals about the results of this methodology were captured to find a relationship between this technology’s Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Usefulness, Attitude Towards Using and the Intention to Further use this technology

The state of the art of medical imaging technology: from creation to archive and back.

Medical imaging has learnt itself well into modern medicine and revolutionized medical industry in the last 30 years. Stemming from the discovery of X-ray by Nobel laureate Wilhelm Roentgen, radiology was born, leading to the creation of large quantities of digital images as opposed to film-based medium. While this rich supply of images provides immeasurable information that would otherwise not be possible to obtain, medical images pose great challenges in archiving them safe from corrupted, lost and misuse, retrievable from databases of huge sizes with varying forms of metadata, and reusable when new tools for data mining and new media for data storing become available. This paper provides a summative account on the creation of medical imaging tomography, the development of image archiving systems and the innovation from the existing acquired image data pools. The focus of this paper is on content-based image retrieval (CBIR), in particular, for 3D images, which is exemplified by our developed online e-learning system, MIRAGE, home to a repository of medical images with variety of domains and different dimensions. In terms of novelties, the facilities of CBIR for 3D images coupled with image annotation in a fully automatic fashion have been developed and implemented in the system, resonating with future versatile, flexible and sustainable medical image databases that can reap new innovations

The State of the Art of Medical Imaging Technology: from Creation to Archive and Back

Medical imaging has learnt itself well into modern medicine and revolutionized medical industry in the last 30 years. Stemming from the discovery of X-ray by Nobel laureate Wilhelm Roentgen, radiology was born, leading to the creation of large quantities of digital images as opposed to film-based medium. While this rich supply of images provides immeasurable information that would otherwise not be possible to obtain, medical images pose great challenges in archiving them safe from corrupted, lost and misuse, retrievable from databases of huge sizes with varying forms of metadata, and reusable when new tools for data mining and new media for data storing become available. This paper provides a summative account on the creation of medical imaging tomography, the development of image archiving systems and the innovation from the existing acquired image data pools. The focus of this paper is on content-based image retrieval (CBIR), in particular, for 3D images, which is exemplified by our developed online e-learning system, MIRAGE, home to a repository of medical images with variety of domains and different dimensions. In terms of novelties, the facilities of CBIR for 3D images coupled with image annotation in a fully automatic fashion have been developed and implemented in the system, resonating with future versatile, flexible and sustainable medical image databases that can reap new innovations

Integrating case based reasoning and geographic information systems in a planing support system: Çeşme Peninsula study

Thesis (Doctoral)--Izmir Institute of Technology, City and Regional Planning, Izmir, 2009Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 110-121)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxii, 140 leavesUrban and regional planning is experiencing fundamental changes on the use of of computer-based models in planning practice and education. However, with this increased use, .Geographic Information Systems. (GIS) or .Computer Aided Design.(CAD) alone cannot serve all of the needs of planning. Computational approaches should be modified to deal better with the imperatives of contemporary planning by using artificial intelligence techniques in city planning process.The main aim of this study is to develop an integrated .Planning Support System. (PSS) tool for supporting the planning process. In this research, .Case Based Reasoning. (CBR) .an artificial intelligence technique- and .Geographic Information Systems. (GIS) .geographic analysis, data management and visualization techniqueare used as a major PSS tools to build a .Case Based System. (CBS) for knowledge representation on an operational study. Other targets of the research are to discuss the benefits of CBR method in city planning domain and to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of this technique in a PSS. .Çeşme Peninsula. case study which applied under the desired methodology is presented as an experimental and operational stage of the thesis.This dissertation tried to find out whether an integrated model which employing CBR&GIS could support human decision making in a city planning task. While the CBS model met many of predefined goals of the thesis, both advantages and limitations have been realized from findings when applied to the complex domain such as city planning

Information Systems and Health Care - V: A MultiModal Approach to Health Care Decision Support Systems

Decision Support Systems (DSS) in health care must be designed in consideration of the empirical context and problem space where they are being applied. However differences such as workflow, clinical expertise and organizational norms make it hard to define the context where a DSS will be used. What is needed is a DSS that is able to enhance health care delivery in different contexts. In this paper we present a multi-modal DSS that supports decision making in different contexts. The paper describes the theoretical basis for the DSS, explores a problem space in palliative care and describes a prototype implementation of the DSS to address the issues from the problem space

Towards Interoperability in E-health Systems: a three-dimensional approach based on standards and semantics

Proceedings of: HEALTHINF 2009 (International Conference on Helath Informatics), Porto (Portugal), January 14-17, 2009, is part of BIOSTEC (Intemational Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies)The interoperability problem in eHealth can only be addressed by mean of combining standards and technology. However, these alone do not suffice. An appropiate framework that articulates such combination is required. In this paper, we adopt a three-dimensional (information, conference and inference) approach for such framework, based on OWL as formal language for terminological and ontological health resources, SNOMED CT as lexical backbone for all such resources, and the standard CEN 13606 for representing EHRs. Based on tha framewok, we propose a novel form for creating and supporting networks of clinical terminologies. Additionally, we propose a number of software modules to semantically process and exploit EHRs, including NLP-based search and inference, wich can support medical applications in heterogeneous and distributed eHealth systems.This work has been funded as part of the Spanish nationally funded projects ISSE (FIT-350300-2007-75) and CISEP (FIT-350301-2007-18). We also acknowledge IST-2005-027595 EU project NeO