Linking molecular imaging terminology to the gene ontology (GO)

The rapidly developing domain of molecular imaging represents the merging of current advances in the fields of molecular biology and imaging research. Despite this merger, an information gap continues to exist between the scientists who discover new gene products and the imaging scientists who can exploit this information. The Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium seeks to provide a set of structured terminologies for the conceptual annotation of gene product function, process and location in databases. However, no such structured set of concept-oriented terminology exists for the molecular imaging domain. Since the purpose of GO is to capture the information about the role of gene products, we propose that the mapping of GO's established ontological concepts to a molecular imaging terminology will provide the necessary bridge to fill the information gap between the two fields. We have extracted terms and definitions from an already published molecular imaging glossary as well as molecular imaging research articles, and developed molecular imaging concepts. We then mapped our molecular imaging concepts to the existing gene ontology concepts as a method to comprehensively represent molecular imaging.