Design and Implementation of a Semantic Dialogue System for Radiologists

This chapter describes a semantic dialogue system for radiologists in a comprehensive case study within the large-scale MEDICO project. MEDICO addresses the need for advanced semantic technologies in the search for medical image and patient data. The objectives are, first, to enable a seamless integration of medical images and different user applications by providing direct access to image semantics, and second, to design and implement a multimodal dialogue shell for the radiologist. Speech-based semantic image retrieval and annotation of medical images should provide the basis for help in clinical decision support and computer aided diagnosis. We will describe the clinical workflow and interaction requirements and focus on the design and implementation of a multimodal user interface for patient/image search or annotation and its implementation while using a speech-based dialogue shell. Ontology modeling provides the backbone for knowledge representation in the dialogue shell and the specific medical application domain; ontology structures are the communication basis of our combined semantic search and retrieval architecture which includes the MEDICO server, the triple store, the semantic search API, the medical visualization toolkit MITK, and the speech-based dialogue shell, amongst others. We will focus on usability aspects of multimodal applications, our storyboard and the implemented speech and touchscreen interaction design.