Online Annotation Tool for Dental Radiology

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Online Annotation Tool for Dental Radiology. Chu J. Tan, B.Sc. 1, Min ... In this project, an online annotation tool for ... JPEG, GIF and TIFF. More significantly, it ...
Online Annotation Tool for Dental Radiology Chu J. Tan, B.Sc. 1, Min Wu, Ph.D. 2 Departments of 1Computer Science and 2 Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Abstract Dental imaging plays a significant role in the process of diagnoses of oral cancer. In this project, an online annotation tool for dental radiology is developed to support systematic annotation, which includes image findings, descriptive information on the lesion, patient characteristics and pathology data. This tool will be available for the dental schools in US who are interested in the creation of dental image archives for teaching and research. Introduction Thirty thousand Americans will be newly diagnosed with oral or pharyngeal cancer in this year1. Some oral cancers can not be seen with the naked eye and located deep internally in the body, making their detection difficult. Radiography can assist dentists in determining the presence of tumors or growths, and even detect malignancy. A trained dentist should be able to detect precursor tissue changes, or the cancer itself in its earliest stage through examination procedures, such as, radiology. The difficulty in implementing effective case studies is two fold. First is the inherent low occurrence nature of “interesting” cases. Even if they do exist, the second problem is the difficulty in implementing effective content-based case retrieval methodology to retrieve these cases. The existing, meaningful cases are stored sparsely among a sea of other cases, in disparate systems and geographical locations, which necessarily limit querying efficiency and portability of the cases. In this study, an online annotation tool for dental radiology is designed and developed at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Methods Dental image annotation is a human-assisted task, so the user requirements were carefully analyzed through collaborative meetings with radiologists in Marquette dental school. The annotation tool is a web-based application that uses the client-server architecture. On the server side, the data is stored in an Oracle database and images are stored as files on the file system. The application is hosted on a JSP enabled Apache web server capable of serving dynamic web pages and processing web forms data. Residing within the application are two specialized software servers, Image Server and Annotation Server, which handles specific request types. Image Server serves as a gateway to image files and safeguards the image files by verifying authorized

users and processes client’s requests for images. Our application supports popular image formats such as JPEG, GIF and TIFF. More significantly, it supports image files that conform to DICOM format. Results The annotation tool allows radiologists to systematic annotate digital dental images with descriptive information on the lesion, patient characteristics, pathology reports and lesion information (see Figure 1). The centralized storage allows for more efficient and powerful querying support, allowing dentists to construct complex queries to quickly find meaningful, related cases efficiently later.

Figure 1. the screen shot of dental annotation tool Discussion After the annotation tool is sufficiently tested for reliability and usability, this software will be available for dental institutions, dental clinics and hospitals around America, who are interested in the creating dental image achieves. If high quality dental image cases can be collected, they can be used to improve and reinforce current dental students and dentists’ skills in interpreting oral cancer images. References 1. Oral Cancer Foundation [homepage on the Internet] Newport Beach: The Oral Cancer Foundation [updated 2005 Jan 26; cited 2005 Jan 26]. Available from: http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/.

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