A deep neural network model for content-based medical image retrieval with multi-view classification

Abstract

In medical applications, retrieving similar images from repositories is most essential for supporting diagnostic imaging-based clinical analysis and decision support systems. However, this is a challenging task, due to the multi-modal and multi-dimensional nature of medical images. In practical scenarios, the availability of large and balanced datasets that can be used for developing intelligent systems for efficient medical image management is quite limited. Traditional models often fail to capture the latent characteristics of images and have achieved limited accuracy when applied to medical images. For addressing these issues, a deep neural network-based approach for view classification and content-based image retrieval is proposed and its application for efficient medical image retrieval is demonstrated. We also designed an approach for body part orientation view classification labels, intending to reduce the variance that occurs in different types of scans. The learned features are used first to predict class labels and later used to model the feature space for similarity computation for the retrieval task. The outcome of this approach is measured in terms of error score. When benchmarked against 12 state-of-the-art works, the model achieved the lowest error score of 132.45, with 9.62–63.14% improvement over other works, thus highlighting its suitability for real-world applications.