Seeking to improve access to high quality biomedical information for individuals around the world, the Lister Hill Center conducts and supports research and development in the dissemination of high quality imagery, medical language processing, high-speed access to biomedical information, intelligent database systems development, multimedia visualization, knowledge management, data mining and machine-assisted indexing.

Building on FY 2002 accomplishments, the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications made significant progress in biomedical informatics research and development during FY 2003. Some of the Lister Hill Center's significant accomplishments include:

Language and Knowledge Processing

• The SPECIALIST Lexicon increased by over 12% to 183,000 lexical items.
• The Metathesaurus was updated to include more than 900,000 concepts with 2.5 million names from 102 source vocabularies in 15 languages.

Image Processing

• Version 1.0 of the Insight Toolkit (ITK), a research and development initiative under the Visible Human Project, was officially released.
• Worldwide utilization of Visible Human Project data sets reached over 1800 licensees in 47 countries.
• A second Content-Based Image Retrieval prototype (CBIR2) was implemented.
• Three prototype DVDs representing the Once and Future Web Exhibition were developed.

Information Systems

• The Genetics Home Reference website was launched.
• The collections of Donald S. Fredrickson, Fred L. Soper and Florence R. Sabin were added to Profiles In Science.
• ClinicalTrials.gov increased the number of protocol records by over 25% from 6,600 protocol records in 2002 to 8,300 records in 2003.
• The Medical Article Records Groundtruth (MARG) database was released.
• The number of DocMorph registered users increased 40% (8,000 registered users).

Infrastructure Research

• NLM's Internet 2 connection to the MAX GigaPOP (Mid Atlantic Exchange Gigabit Point of Presence) was increased from 155 megabits per second (OC-12) to gigabit speed (gig-E).
• Seeking to encourage the development of health related applications of scalable, network aware, wireless, geographic information systems, and identification technologies in a networked environment, 11 Scalable Information Infrastructure research contract awards were made.

Training

• Training was provided to 48 participants from 18 states and 6 countries.

FY 2003 Annual Report