Texture edge statistics for efficient retrieval of biomedical images

Abstract

Adoption of Clinical Decision Support Systems in the process of clinical decision process has been gaining attention in recent times. Such intelligent decision support systems need frequent access to historic medical data such as medical images and associated reports. Content Based Image Retrieval has been preferred choice of technique for such smart retrieval of medical images based on their content. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for deriving edge based features for retrieval of medical images. Texture edges are known to represent the tissue boundaries better than intensity edges in medical images. Therefore, we use texture edges for describing image structure instead of traditional approach of using intensity edges. We demonstrate that retrieval performance at organ level in medical images using texture edges is superior to intensity edges.