Ontological Levels in Histological Imaging

Antony Galton, Gabriel Landini, David Randell, and Shereen Fouad

In Roberta Ferrario and Werner Kuhn, Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference FOIS 2016, IOS Press, 2016, pp.271-284.
ISBN 978-1-62499-659-0 (print), 978-1-61499-660-6 (online)

Abstract

In this paper we present an ontological perspective on ongoing work in histological and histopathological imaging involving the quantitative and algorithmic analysis of digitised images of cells and tissues. We present the derivation of consistent histological models from initially captured images of prepared tissue samples as a progression through a number of ontological levels, each populated by its distinctive classes of entities related in systematic ways to entities at other levels. We see this work as contributing to ongoing efforts to provide a consistent and widely accepted suite of ontological resources such as those currently constituting the OBO Foundry, and where possible we draw links between our work and existing ontologies within that suite.

Full paper

The work reported in this paper was funded by EPSRC grant EP/M023869/1, Novel context-based segmentation algorithms for intelligent microscopy

Antony Galton