IJIRST International Journal for Innovative Research in Science & Technology| Volume 3 | Issue 04 | September 2016

ISSN (online): 2349-6010

A Survey on Medical Image Retrieval Systems

Riny Joy Jyothish K John
PG Student Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engineering Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Federal Institute of Science & Technology Federal Institute of Science & Technology

Abstract
Content Based Image Retrieval plays very crucial role in many fields including medical field. Since medical image databases are
rapidly expanding in quantity and heterogeneity, an efficient retrieval system is needed by clinicians. Medical image retrieval is
fundamental to modern healthcare because it helps in clinical decision making, evidence-based diagnosis, teaching, and research.
This survey gives an overview of available literature in the field of content based medical image access and on the technologies
used in the field.
Keywords: Medical Image Retrieval, Medical Diagnosis
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

I. INTRODUCTION

With the development of several technologies, medical image databases are rapidly increasing day by day. So efficient image
browsing, searching and retrieval tools are required by clinicians and medical specialists, etc. Medical images form an important
component of a patient's health record. Effective medical image retrieval systems can play an important role in aiding early
diagnosis and accurate treatment. Medical database exists in various modalities and the most common among them are Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) scan. CT scan is a most widely used imaging tool that combines
computer technologies and X-rays to produce a more detailed cross sectional image of the human body. MRI is another modern
medical imaging technique that produces cross-sectional images of our body and works without radiation. The MRI tool uses
magnetic fields and an advanced computer to take high resolution pictures of our bones and soft tissues. Fig.1 shows example
medical images of CT scan and MRI.

Fig. 1: Example medical images of CT scan (a) (b) (c) and MRI (d) (e) (f)

Many researcher studies shows that modality is an important filters that they would like to be able to limit their search by.
Older images that are digitized might not retain the modality information and this will be a time consuming and difficult process
if the radiologist has to manually assign the modality to these images.
Studies show that there are mainly two frameworks for image retrieval systems. The first is text based systems and the other
one is the content based. The text based approaches are mainly used in 1970s.In these systems, the images need to be manually
annotated by text before storing to the database. The main disadvantages for this systems are level of human labour is required
for manual annotation and annotation inaccuracy due to the subjectivity of human perception. In order to solve this content-based
image retrieval (CBIR) was introduced in the early 1990's.Which will retrieve images based on their content. To facilitate the

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system need to extract the feature vectors from the query image. Then the feature vector of the query image is compared with the
feature vectors of the database images and the similar images are then retrieved. The efficiency of the image retrieval systems is
mostly dependent on these feature vectors. These feature descriptors utilize the visual information of the image such as shape,
texture, edges, color histograms, etc. This paper presents a study on these feature descriptors used in the Content based image
retrieval systems.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section II, literature survey is briefly described. Section III summarizes the
study.

II. RELATED WORKS

In [2] Timo Ojala, Matti Pietikae inen presents Multiresolution Gray-Scale and Rotation Invariant Texture Classification with
Local Binary Patterns. This work explains a gray-scale and rotation invariant texture operator based on local binary patterns. It
starts from the joint distribution of gray scale values of a circularly symmetric neighbor set of pixels in a local neighborhood, and
they derived an operator that is invariant against any monotonic transformation of the gray scale. The main focus of this work is
in recognizing that some local binary texture patterns termed uniform are fundamental main properties of local image texture
and it is used and in developing a generalized gray-scale and rotation invariant operator for detecting these uniform patterns. The
name uniform is due to the uniform appearance of local binary pattern. The main advantages of this work are its theoretical and
computational simplicity, robustness in terms of grayscale variations and it discriminate large range of rotated textures
efficiently. The drawbacks are it is not suitable for scale invariance, the operator is not suitable when dominant features appears
at very large scale, the operator produces large histograms and it is not too robust on flat image areas.
In [3] Agma J.M. Traina, Cesar A.B. Castanon, Caetano Traina Jr. presents a MultiWaveMed System for Medical Image
Retrieval through Wavelets Transformations. This is a software which allows the indexing and retrieval of medical images by
comparing their texture features. Wavelet transforms are used for the extraction of feature vectors. This system implemented
both Daubechies and Gabor wavelets. The contribution of this work is to prove that the suitability of wavelet transforms on
medical image characterization and their utility for indexing and retrieval. This system is mainly intended for magnetic
resonance medical images. The main advantage is that high precision results can be obtained in a short interval of time and the
feature extraction process of the dataset is done off line, without interfering with the query processing. While the disadvantage is
that it produces a high dimension feature vector.
In [4] an Image Retrieval Based on Regions of Interest is presented by Khanh Vu, Kien A. Hua and Wallapak Tavanapong. In
most cases the query image contains not only the objects of the users interest, but also irrelevant areas which will limit the
effectiveness and efficiency of image retrieval systems. This work addresses this problem by proposing a similarity model for
region-of-interest (ROI) queries. It helps the user to correctly include only relevant areas for formulating a query, called ROI
queries. And to use this type of queries users must be permitted to query arbitrarily-shaped images. This work utilize this type of
query using sampling-based approach. The advantage of this sampling based approach called SamMatch is, robust to scaling and
translation of objects.
In [5] K. Konstantinidis, A. Gasteratos and I. Andreadis presents an Image retrieval based on fuzzy color histogram
processing. Color image histogram is one of the main tool which is used in the CBIR systems. The problem with the classic
method of color histogram creation is that it creates very large histograms with large variations between neighboring bins so that,
little changes in the image might result in great changes in the histogram. Also another problem is that the color space leads to 3-
dimensional histograms .Handling these 3D histograms is a complicated process. An alternate approach for this problem is that
project the 3D histogram onto one 1D histogram which is called histogram linking. This work explains a new fuzzy linking
method of color histogram. It is based on an Lab color space and provides a histogram which contains only 10 bins. When
compared to other methods this method is less sensitive to lighting variations, occlusions and noise and gives high accuracy. But
it cannot be employed in medical applications because medical applications need exact matched images in the database and it
take more time for retrieval.
In [6] Rouhollah Rahmani, Sally A. Goldman, Hui Zhang, John Krettek, and Jason E. Fritts presents a Localized Content
Based Image Retrieval. Instead of a single query image no indication of which portion of the image is of interest, this work uses
labeled images in conjunction with a multiple-instance learning algorithm to first identify the desired object and re-weight the
features, and then to rank images in the database using a similarity measure that is based upon individual regions within the
image. It gives better results when compared to other CBIR systems but this retrieval system is very time consuming.
In [7] Md. Mahmudur Rahman, Prabir Bhattacharya and Bipin C. Desai presents A Framework for Medical Image Retrieval
Using Machine Learning and Statistical Similarity Matching Techniques With Relevance Feedback. This work is mainly
intended for medical applications. When considering the image retrieval systems in medical applications medical image modality
is one of the main filter need to be considered. Therefore this work is an approach for the automatic categorization and
prefiltering of diverse medical images. A machine learning technique is used to associate low-level global image features with
their high-level semantic categories. Also they incorporated the principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the feature vector
dimensionality. In addition with membership values of query images found online by a multiclass SVM and a minimum distance
classifier, the cluster and class membership probabilities of each database image is also used. Then the join probability of these
memberships as a product of the individual membership is taken and they are ranked in descending order to filter out irrelevant
images. A relevance feedback is also incorporated to refine the query parameters for modifying the ranking of retrieved images.

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 A Survey on Medical Image Retrieval Systems
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The advantages are Statistical similarity measures performed far better than the traditional Euclidean distance measure and RF
technique is also very effective, and showed improvement in retrieval results within a few iterations. The increased
computational complexity and the execution time are the main drawbacks of the system.
In [8] Devrim Unay, Ahmet Ekin, and Radu S. Jasinschi presents a Local Structure-Based Region-of-Interest Retrieval in
Brain MR Images. As the name indicates this work mainly intended for MR images which is considered as one the main
modality in the medical image databases. The intensity of the MR images will vary with the scanning parameters, the age of the
device, and the patient characteristics. To make this problem worse, due to the imperfect magnetic field, the intensity values of a
specific tissue may also be not stationary within a MRI image. This work actually introduces an efficient method to
automatically select key slices from brain MR images. It uses two local structure features such as local binary patterns (LBP) and
KanadeLucasTomasi (KLT) feature points. The advantages of this work are it eliminated the intensity related issues in MR
image retrieval systems,
Incorporating spatial information in the LBPs substantially improved accuracy, It Does not require registration, intensity
normalization or bias field correction. But, the retrieval problem addressed in this work has an inherent difficulty due to the very
similar content present in the data and the method has a High computational complexity.
In [9] Subrahmanyam Murala, Q.M. Jonathan Wu presents Local ternary co-occurrence patterns: A new feature descriptor for
MRI and CT image retrieval. The work proposes a feature extraction algorithm called local ternary co-occurrence patterns
(LTCoP) for biomedical image retrieval. Based on the gray values of center pixel and its surrounding neighbors the co-
occurrence of similar ternary edges are calculated which is then encoded to form LTCoP. Also, the efficiency of this algorithm is
confirmed by combining it with the Gabor transform. The advantages include it produces high precision compared to LBP, LDP
and LTP and since it is effective than previous methods, it is suitable for other pattern recognition applications such as face
recognition, fingerprint recognition,etc. while , the high dimensionality which are generally more time consuming for image
retrieval.
In [10] Subrahmanyam Murala, Q.M.Jonathan Wu presents a Spherical symmetric 3D local ternary patterns for natural,
texture and biomedical image indexing and retrieval. The work uses using spherical symmetric three dimensional local ternary
patterns (SS-3D-LTP) for natural, texture and biomedical image retrieval applications. The other methods encodes the
relationship between the center pixel and its surrounding neighbors in 2D local region of an image while this work encodes this
relationship with five selected directions in 3D plane. This five selected directions in 3D plane is generated from 2D image using
multiresolution Gaussian filter bank. It can be applied natural,biomedical,texture images effectively while feature vector length
of the SS-3D-LTPu2 is more as compared to LBP, LTP and LDP and the precision is only about 60%.
In [11] Subrahmanyam Murala and Q. M. Jonathan Wu presents Local Mesh Patterns Versus Local Binary Patterns:
Biomedical Image Indexing and Retrieval .In this work , a new image indexing and retrieval algorithm using local mesh patterns
are used for biomedical image retrieval application. In addition with considering the relationship with the center pixel and
neighboring pixels this work encodes the relationship among the surrounding neighbors for a given referenced pixel in an image.
The number of neighbors is the factor need to be considered for encoding the possible relationships among the surrounding
neighbors. The method outperforms other existing methods (LBP, GLBP, DBWP) in terms of precision, recall, ARP, and ARR.
While the feature vector length and execution time of the LMeP is more as compared to the LBP is a drawback.

III. CONCLUSION

This paper summarizes the most popular and accepted methodologies applicable to the various image retrieval systems. The need
of medical image retrieval systems is due to the fact that traditional image retrieval methods will not provide better results on
medical image databases. The studies proves that in addition with the accuracy and efficiency of these medical image retrieval
systems it must use a low dimensional feature vector to reduce the computational and time complexity.

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