A Multimedia Approach to Medical Information Retrieval

Abstract

From the discovery of DNA by Francis H. C. Crick and James D. Watson in 1953 there have been conducted a lot of research in the field of DNA. Up through the years technological breakthroughs has made DNA sequencing more faster and more available, and has gone from being a very manual task to be highly automated. In 1990 the Human Genome Project was started and the research in DNA skyrocketed. DNA was sequenced faster and faster throughout the 1990s, and more projects with goals of sequencing other specie's DNA was initiated. All this research of DNA led to vast amounts of DNA sequences, but the techniques for searching through these DNA sequences was not developed at the same pace. The need for new and improved methods of searching in DNA is becoming more and more evident. This thesis explores the possibilities of using content based information retrieval to search through DNA sequences. This is a bold proposition but can have great benefits if successfully implemented. By transforming DNA sequences to images, and indexing these images with a content based information retrieval system it can be possible to achieve a successful DNA search. We discover that this is possible but further work has to be done in order to solve some discovered issues with the transforming of the DNA sequences to images.