Combination of visual and symbolic knowledge: A survey in anatomy

- Alarge “gap” to fill between the high level bio-medicalknowledgeand the quantitative information extracted from the spatial data of anatomy.
- Authors revieweda wide span of literature in order to investigate the requisite effort that is still needed to support the development of sophisticated computational anatomy.
- Authors underlined key research challenges towards the realization of a comprehensive integration between patient-specific 3D spatial data and formalized domain knowledge.
- Highlighted the feasible path in which thisintegration can be best applied to support the development of next-generation healthcare systems.

In medicine, anatomy is considered as the most discussed field and results in a huge amount of knowledge, which is heterogeneous and covers aspects that are mostly independent in nature. Visual and symbolic modalities are mainly adopted for exemplifying knowledge about human anatomy and are crucial for the evolution of computational anatomy. In particular, a tight integration of visual and symbolic modalities is beneficial to support knowledge-driven methods for biomedical investigation. In this paper, we review previous work on the presentation and sharing of anatomical knowledge, and the development of advanced methods for computational anatomy, also focusing on the key research challenges for harmonizing symbolic knowledge and spatial 3D data.