The MedGIFT Project: Global Perspectives of a Medical Doctor

Abstract

Medical image retrieval covers an important and wide application area in medical imaging, with one major goal being in providing assistance in medical diagnosis. With the availability of image data in the electronic patient records and thus to all medical doctors, the need to search and retrieve images efficiently and accurately from large image databases such as picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) has drastically increased. To address this demand, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been proposed for a long time with many systems being built to meet several application demands. However, in most systems there is still a gap between the end user’s expectations and the system’s retrieval capabilities. Relatively little attention has so far been paid to the process of evaluating the effectiveness of CBIR methods and its real impact among the health care professionals through optimized user interaction. This paper addresses the actual problem of content-based medical image retrieval, which aims more particularly at highlighting the perspectives of a medical doctor on content-based image retrieval, its pos