Seeking to improve access to high quality biomedical information for individuals around the world, the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications 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 2003 accomplishments, the Lister Hill Center made significant progress in biomedical informatics research and development during FY 2004. Some of the Lister Hill Center's significant accomplishments include:

Language and Knowledge Processing

• The SPECIALIST Lexicon increased by over 32% to 242,000 lexical items.
• The Metathesaurus was updated to include more than 1 million concepts with 5 million names from 117 source vocabularies in 15 languages.

Image Processing

• Versions 1.6 and 1.8 of the Insight Toolkit (ITK), a research and development initiative under the Visible Human Project, were officially released.
• Worldwide utilization of Visible Human Project data sets reached over 2000 licensees in 48 countries.
• A third Content-Based Image Retrieval prototype (CBIR2) was implemented.
• Using a new template technology, LHC staff developed a symposium DVD-ROM The Library As a Place: A Symposium on Building and Renovating Health Sciences Libraries in the Digital Age and a Conference DVD From Double Helix to Human Sequence - And Beyond featuring over 10 hours of informative video and Web accessible information.

Information Systems

• Over 160 gene summaries were added to the Genetics Home Reference Web site.
• The Visual Culture and Health Posters, as well as the collections of C. Everett Koop and Wilbur A. Sawyer were added to Profiles In Science.
• ClinicalTrials.gov increased the number of protocol records by over 40% from 8,300 protocol records in 2003 to 11,700 records in 2004.
• MyMorph 1.0 was officially released.
• The number of DocMorph registered users increased 25% to 10,000 registered users.

Infrastructure Research

• Migration of LHC critical systems to the NCCS was completed.
• Progress was made on 11 Scalable Information Infrastructure (SII) research contract awards, a program designed to encourage the development of health related applications of scalable, network aware, wireless, geographic information systems, and identification technologies in a networked environment.

Training

• Training was provided to 53 participants from 17 states and 8 countries.

FY 2004 Annual Report