Multifaceted Hyperimage-Based Organization and Interaction with Bio-Medical Images

The abundance of complex media-rich information in state-of-the-art bio-medical sciences underlines the importance of paradigms for organizing, searching, browsing, and assimilating such data. In this context, image-based information, derived from a plethora of biological and medical devices, presents unique challenges. This is partially due to the richness of information expressible through visual media and the complexity of the underlying semantics. There is today a paucity of paradigms that allow organization and browsing of large image collections, in manners that capture the intricacies of image semantics and support experiential factors in information assimilation and user-data interactions. This paper presents our research in designing such an organizational framework. Central to our approach is the philosophy of recognizing and directly capturing the heterogeneity of semantics that may exist even for a single bio-medical image. Using this as a starting point, we extend the notion of image hyperlinking to support multiple semantic associations between bio-medical images. By using these associations, expressed as hyperlinks, image collections can be organized simultaneously from different biological or medical perspectives. We also consider the issues of creating, storing, and managing information in such an organizational paradigm. Finally, we describe a unified presentation-interaction environment that facilitates user interactions including information organization, querying, and exploration. Examples and case studies demonstrate the promise and broad applicability of this research.