Analyzing DICOM and non-DICOM Features in Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval: A Multi-Layer Approach

This paper presents a hybrid approach to perform content-based retrieval on medical image databases. It takes advantage of a pre-processed case base that is batch updated. DICOM information is used to perform pre-filtering to speed up the retrieval process and a image processing knowledge base is used to dynamically reconfigure the most appropriated image processing procedures to perform the image feature extraction. It shows that pre-filtering can speed up considerably the retrieval process and also that some image features produce very similar results what leads to future work on defining the needed digital image processing knowledge base.