Annotation of medical images

Automatic image annotation is a technique that automatically assigns a set of linguistic terms to images in order to categorize the images conceptually and provide means for effectively accessing images from databases. This chapter firstly introduces fundamentals and techniques of automatic image annotation to give an overview of this research field. A case study, which describes the methodology for annotating mammographic lesions, is then presented. This chapter is intended to disseminate the knowledge of the automatic annotation approaches to the applications of medical image management and to attract greater interest from various research communities to rapidly advance research in this field.