A simple texture feature for retrieval of medical images

Texture characteristic is an important attribute of medical images, and has been applied in many medical image applications. This paper proposes a simple approach to employ the texture features of medical images for retrieval. The developed approach first conducts image filtering to medical images using different Gabor and Schmid filters, and then uniformly partitions the filtered images into non-overlapping patches. These operations provide extensive local texture information of medical images. The bag-of-words model is finally used to obtain feature representations of the images. Compared with several existing features, the proposed one is more discriminative and efficient. Experiments on two benchmark medical CT image databases have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.