The Medico project is part of the THESEUS research program initiated by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi). Medico was proposed by an industry-led consortium in August 2006, accepted by the BWMi and started in August 2007. The BMWi granted 90 Mio EUR to THESEUS over five years.
The vision of the Medico project is to provide semantic access to medical image databases. The idea is to automatically generate formal descriptions of medical images. A user can then search those descriptions by providing query keywords or a query image. When a query image is used, it is automatically decomposed and keywords are generated from its formal description which are used for the search.
To achieve this vision, several sub-problems have to be solved:

• The robust hierarchical decomposition and understanding of medical images

• Development of a new scalable and hierarchical information representation

• Development of new architectures that support semantic image search and scalable searching solutions.
  

The potential for intelligent image search engines for the medical domain is huge:

• Future clinicians will be able to search and access image databases based on content and semantics, thus receiving point-of-care decision support.

• CAD (Computer Aided Detection) technologies will benefit by operating at the higher, semantic level, hence shortening the time-to-market interval.

• Patient recruitment for clinical trials could be implemented in a straightforward manner by searching the image content.

• Epidemiological studies could be pursued by searching geographically distributed image databases.