Evaluation of Shape Indexing Methods for ContentBased Retrieval of XRay Images Sameer Ant.pdfVIP

Evaluation of Shape Indexing Methods for Content-Based Retrieval of X-Ray Images a a a b Sameer Antani , L. Rodney Long , George R. Thoma , and D.J. Lee a Communications Engineering Branch Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications National Library of Medicine Bethesda, MD 20894 b Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602 ABSTRACT Efficient content-based image retrieval of biomedical images is a challenging problem of growing research inter- est. Feature representation algorithms used in indexing medical images on the pathology of interest have to address conflicting goals of reducing feature dimensionality while retaining important and often subtle biomedi- cal features. At the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, a RD division of the National Library of Medicine, we are developing a content-based image retrieval system for digitized images of a collection of 17,000 cervical and lumbar x-rays taken as a part of the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES II). Shape is the only feature that effectively describes various pathologies identified by med- ical experts as being consistently and reliably found in the image collection. In order to determine if the state of the art in shape representation methods is suitable for this application, we have evaluated representative algorithms selected from the literature. The algorithms were teste