Brinkley, James F.

Lober, William B.

PubMed

Lober, W. B.

Brinkley, James F

University of Washington Structural Informatics Group Publications

A Portable Image Annotation Tool for Web-based Anatomy Atlases
William B. Lober MD1,2 and James F. Brinkley MD, PhD2
Division of Emergency Medicine, Department of Medicine1
Structural Informatics Group, Department of Biological Structure2
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington USA
INTERACTIVE ATLASES
Collections of annotated images have application in
many areas of medicine. As part of the Digital
Anatomist Project, our group has developed a series
of web based atlases, each consisting of annotated
images depicting anatomic structures1. The atlases
are interactively accessed over the Web via "cgi"
programs. The atlases are used in undergraduate
medical education courses at the University of
Washington, and by other users throughout the world.
The server software is independent of atlas content,
and other authors are interested in creating and pub-
lishing their own atlases on the Web.  The greatest
impediment has been the lack of an easy-to-use im-
age annotation tool. The AnnoteImage program de-
scribed in this paper addresses this shortcoming.
IMPLEMENTATION
AnnoteImage is written as a "pure" Java 1.12 appli-
cation, using Microsoft’s Visual J++ development
environment3, and runs on either Sun’s or Microsoft’s
virtual machines.  It has been tested on Pentium
processor systems running Windows 98, NT 4.0, and
Red Hat Linux 5.24.
ATLAS AUTHORING
Authoring an atlas begins with the selection of im-
ages, which can be in either GIF or JPEG formats.
Annotations, consisting of outlined regions of inter-
est, "pin" locations, and colored "strings" connecting
the pins to text labels, are added by the domain expert
to identify regions of interest.  A specific annotation
type may be used to point to animated "movie" links.
Annotations are stored in a text file using an attrib-
ute/value notation in a LISP-like syntax.  The file
contains a pointer to the related image, as well as
comment and presentation metadata.  The file also
contains the annotations themselves, which consist of
a type, pin location, id, and a vector representation of
the outline of each region of interest.
Both image and annotation files are copied into an
atlas directory structure, and a file is created to con-
trol hierarchical navigation between the images.  The
cgi scripts use the directory structure and navigation
file, in conjunction with user input, to generate web
pages reflecting the user’s information requests and
preferred mode of operation.
CONCLUSION
We have built a portable, easy to use, tool for gener-
alized annotation of outlined regions on GIF or JPEG
images, which can run under any system which sup-
ports a Java virtual machine. We hope that this
authoring tool will facilitate creation of atlas content
at independent sites, which may then be linked to-
gether to form a distributed educational resource.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Development of a version that runs as a privileged
applet will simplify both code distribution and atlas
publication. Enhancement of the annotation format
will allow incorporation of different types of annota-
tions, such as point elements and overlays, while re-
maining independent of any specific domain.
AnnoteImage display depicting an image, outlined
regions (with "pins", "strings", and labels), and tool-
bars for controlling annotation navigation, editing,
and image metadata.
                                                          
Funded by NLM grant LM06316.
1
 J. F. Brinkley, S. W. Bradley, J. W. Sundsten, and
C. Rosse, "The Digital Anatomist information system
and its use in the generation and delivery of Web-
based anatomy atlases," Computers and Biomedical
Research, vol. 30, pp. 472-503, 1997.
2
 Sun Microsystems, Mountain View, CA
3 VJ++ 6.0, Microsoft Corp, Redmond, WA
4
 Red Hat Software, Durham, NC
http://sig.biostr.washington.edu/
lober@u.washington.edu


English

A Portable Image Annotation Tool for Web-Based Anatomy Atlases

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2232864

A Portable Image Annotation Tool for Web-based Anatomy Atlases

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