Exploring perceptually similar cases with multi-dimensional scaling

Abstract

Retrieving a set of known lesions similar to the one being evaluated might be of value for assisting radiologists to distinguish between benign and malignant clustered microcalcifications (MCs) in mammograms. In this work, we investigate how perceptually similar cases with clustered MCs may relate to one another in terms of their underlying characteristics (from disease condition to image features). We first conduct an observer study to collect similarity scores from a group of readers (five radiologists and five non-radiologists) on a set of 2,000 image pairs, which were selected from 222 cases based on their images features. We then explore the potential relationship among the different cases as revealed by their similarity ratings. We apply the multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) technique to embed all the cases in a 2-D plot, in which perceptually similar cases are placed in close vicinity of one another based on their level of similarity. Our results show that cases having different characteristics in their clustered MCs are accordingly placed in different regions in the plot. Moreover, cases of same pathology tend to be clustered together locally, and neighboring cases (which are more similar) tend to be also similar in their clustered MCs (e.g., cluster size and shape). These results indicate that subjective similarity ratings from the readers are well correlated with the image features of the underlying MCs of the cases, and that perceptually similar cases could be of diagnostic value for discriminating between malignant and benign cases.