Storage and retrieval of digital images in dermatology.
BACKGROUND
Differential diagnosis in dermatology relies on the interpretation of visual information in the form of clinical and histopathological images. Up until now, reference images have had to be retrieved from textbooks and/or appropriate journals. To overcome inherent limitations of those storage media with respect to the number of images stored, display, and search parameters available, we designed a computer-based database of digitized dermatologic images.


METHODS
Images were taken from the photo archive of the Dermatological Clinic of the University of Erlangen. A database was designed using the Entity-Relationship approach. It was implemented on a PC-Windows platform using MS Access* and MS Visual Basic®. As WWW-server a Sparc 10 workstation was used with the CERN Hypertext-Transfer-Protocol-Daemon (httpd) 3.0 pre 6 software running.


RESULTS
For compressed storage on a hard drive, a quality factor of 60 allowed on-screen differential diagnosis and corresponded to a compression factor of 1:35 for clinical images and 1:40 for histopathological images. Hierarchical keys of clinical or histopathological criteria permitted multi-criteria searches. A script using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) enabled remote search and image retrieval via the World-Wide-Web (W3).


CONCLUSIONS
A dermatologic image database, featurig clinical and histopathological images was constructed which allows for multi-parameter searches and world-wide remote access.
Department of Dermatology, School of Medicine, University of Erlangen, Germany.
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Bittorf
Department of Dermatology, School of Medicine, University of Erlangen, Germany.
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Krejci-Papa
Department of Dermatology, School of Medicine, University of Erlangen, Germany.
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Diepgen
World-Wide-Web (W3); classification; dermatology.; digital imaging; image database