The science of solving clinical problems by analyzing images generated in clinical practice is known as medical image analysis. The aim is to extract information in an affective and efficient manner for improved clinical diagnosis. The recent advances in the field of biomedical engineering has made medical image analysis one of the top research and development area. One of the reason for this advancement is the application of machine learning techniques for the analysis of medical images. Deep learning is successfully used as a tool for machine learning, where a neural network is capable of automatically learning features. This is in contrast to those methods where traditionally hand crafted features are used. The selection and calculation of these features is a challenging task. Among deep learning techniques, deep convolutional networks are actively used for the purpose of medical image analysis. This include application areas such as segmentation, abnormality detection, disease classification, computer aided diagnosis and retrieval.

With a widespread use of digital imaging data in hospitals, the size of medical image repositories is increasing rapidly. This causes difficulty in managing and querying these large databases leading to the need of content based medical image retrieval (CBMIR) systems. A major challenge in CBMIR systems is the semantic gap that exists between the low level visual information captured by imaging devices and high level semantic information perceived by human. The efficacy of such systems is more crucial in terms of feature representations that can characterize the high-level information completely. In this paper, we propose a framework of deep learning for CBMIR system by using deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that is trained for classification of medical images. An intermodal dataset that contains twenty four classes and five modalities is used to train the network. The learned features and the classification results are used to retrieve medical images. For retrieval, best results are achieved when class based predictions are used. An average classification accuracy of 99.77% and a mean average precision of 0.69 is achieved for retrieval task. The proposed method is best suited to retrieve multimodal medical images for different body organs.

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