Access Modalities to an Imagistic Library for Medical e-Learning

The paper presents the organization way and the access facilities to a multimedia digital library with medical information for electronic learning. The digital library contains course materials and medical images collected in the patient's diagnosis process. The originality of the paper is given by the presentation of two access modalities to multimedia information from the digital library: content-based visual query and semantic query. The content-based visual query can be effectuated at the image or region level using colour and texture characteristics automatically extracted from medical images at their loading in the database. Also, semantic queries against the multimedia database can be automatically launched with the help of the topic map based on a part of MeSH thesaurus, the part that includes the medical diagnosis names. The student can navigate through topic map depending on its interest subject, bringing in this way big advantages. These access paths can be combined for retrieving the interest information. The multimedia digital library represents a very useful tool in the medical knowledge improvement, addressing to the students, resident doctors, young specialists or family doctors.