title: Biomedical imaging ontologies: A survey and proposal for future work.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Ontology is one strategy for promoting interoperability of heterogeneous data through consistent tagging. An ontology is a controlled structured vocabulary consisting of general terms (such as "cell" or "image" or "tissue" or "microscope") that form the basis for such tagging. These terms are designed to represent the types of entities in the domain of reality that the ontology has been devised to capture; the terms are provided with logical definitions thereby also supporting reasoning over the tagged data.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  This paper provides a survey of the biomedical imaging ontologies that have been developed thus far. It outlines the challenges, particularly faced by ontologies in the fields of histopathological imaging and image analysis, and suggests a strategy for addressing these challenges in the example domain of quantitative histopathology imaging.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The ultimate goal is to support the multiscale understanding of disease that comes from using interoperable ontologies to integrate imaging data with clinical and genomics data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, The State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
authors.forename: Barry
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Ontopro LLC, Houston, TX 77025, USA.
authors.forename: Sivaram
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Arabandi
authors.affiliation: Division of Biomedical Informatics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR 72205, USA.
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brochhausen
authors.affiliation: Department of Health and Human Performance, Elon University, Elon, NC 27244, USA.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Calhoun
authors.affiliation: Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, PerkinElmer Innovation Labs, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
authors.forename: Paolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ciccarese
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14214, USA.
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Doyle
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire du Traitement du Signal et de l'Image (LTSI), Inserm Unit 1099, University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France.
authors.forename: Bernard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Gibaud
authors.affiliation: National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, Baltimore, MD 21224, USA.
authors.forename: Ilya
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Goldberg
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
authors.forename: Charles E
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Kahn
authors.affiliation: Knocean, Toronto, Ontario, M6P 2T3, Canada.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Overton
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14214, USA.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tomaszewski
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
authors.forename: Metin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gurcan
keywords: Histopathology imaging; interoperability; ontology; quantitative histopathology image ontology