Medical Imaging Informatics: Challenges of Definition and Integration

Drawing on biophysics and engineering for primary methodology, medical imaging traditionally has had little overlap with medical informatics. This, however, is beginning to change. As new imaging modalities have proliferated, general-purpose image analysis software has been developed to incorporate not only low-level processing but also increasingly sophisticated functions that extract, transform, and combine the medical content from sets of related images. All require expert physician interaction to determine and interpret the content that is of interest for a specific patient. However, with the rapid and seemingly endless rise in computational power coinciding with unprecedented constraints on health costs, the potential and pressure for automating all but the most routine functions increase apace. This raises important issues for medical informatics, since any automation, however gradual, requires us to improve our understanding of the underlying image data and knowledge and its explicit definition, representation, and use on the computer.This special issue of JAMIA contains a section of three papers addressing some of the …