Assisted browsing in a diagnostic image database

ABSTRACT

The paper describes a significant part of an experimental system for producing digital medical images, processing them to extract suitable spatial indexes, and to store and retrieve by content such images in order to provide users with an assisted visual browser to navigate a distributed archive. A prerequisite for the system described in this paper is that a physician should be able to manipulate the diagnostic images by simple visual commands that allow content-based access. In particular, the physician have to identify abnormalities (hot spots) in each image by deteriming their spatical locations, opacities, shapes and geometrical measures.Since our system needs the capability of retrieving images based on the presence of given patterns, it is necessary to define a similarity matching between the query and an image to retrieve. To efficiently perform such a matching, each image is stored together with a collection of metadata that are a very compact representation of the spatical contents of the image. These metadata forms the index of the image.We illustrate an experimental image browser for medical imaging diagnosis implementing the query-by-pictorial-example philosophy for user interface.

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