Accessing and representing knowledge in the medical field: Visual and lexical modalities

One of the challenging directions of the research in modern medicine is modeling a digital patient, i.e. a digital counterpart that should represent and abstract the real patient in all his/her medically relevant aspects. The digital patient is nowadays a realistic vision: we witness a huge flow of data every day, either born-digital or easy to digitize. This flow is constituted by numerical measurements (lab data, bedside measurements, home instrumentation), recorded information (family history, patient medical history, current complaints, symptoms), signals (ECG, EEG, EMG), images (X-ray, MRI, CT, Ultrasound), physical examinations, and narrative text (e.g. doctor's notes, discharge summaries) [1].