The Importance of Medical Multimedia

Multimedia research is becoming more and more important for the medical domain, where an increasing number of videos and images are integrated in the daily routine of surgical and diagnostic work. While the collection of medical multimedia data is not an issue, appropriate tools for efficient use of this data are missing. This includes management and inspection of the data, visual analytics, as well as learning relevant semantics and using recognition results for optimizing surgical and diagnostic processes. The characteristics and requirements in this interesting but challenging field are different than the ones in classic multimedia domains. Therefore, this tutorial gives a general introduction to the field, provides a broad overview of specific requirements and challenges, discusses existing work and open challenges, and elaborates in detail how machine learning approaches can help in multimedia-related fields to improve the performance of surgeons/clinicians.