AUTOMATIC RECONSTRUCTION OF VASCULATURE

Two of the most difficult problems in Artificial Intelligence are proc essing visual scenes and processing natural languages. There has been a large amount of research in each of these fields but little on their integration. This is surprising given the potential importance of int egrated systems, not only for understanding human cognition but also f or the range of practical applications that will be enabled. We review previous work and provide an overview of our own work. We focus upon the medical application of reconstructing complicated cerebral blood v essel structures and associated pathologies from images and medical re ports. This gives our work a clear and significant practical aim. We s how how the ostensibly disparate technologies can be married using a s ingle knowledge representation. Previous attempts at reconstruction ha ve used images alone and no satisfactory solution exists. We believe t hat the synergy provided by integrating vision and natural language pr ocessing provides an information-rich environment that will enable pro gress toward an efficient and robust solution. Such an integration wil l have not only have important practical uses but also implications fo r Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive science, Philosophy, and Psycholo gy.