A New Approach for Effective Retrieval of Medical Images: A Step towards Computer-Assisted Diagnosis

The biomedical imaging field has grown enormously in the past decade. In the era of digitization, the demand for computer-assisted diagnosis is increasing day by day. The COVID-19 pandemic further emphasized how retrieving meaningful information from medical repositories can aid in improving the quality of patient's diagnosis. Therefore, content-based retrieval of medical images has a very prominent role in fulfilling our ultimate goal of developing automated computer-assisted diagnosis systems. Therefore, this paper presents a content-based medical image retrieval system that extracts multi-resolution, noise-resistant, rotation-invariant texture features in the form of a novel pattern descriptor, i.e., MsNrRiTxP, from medical images. In the proposed approach, the input medical image is initially decomposed into three neutrosophic images on its transformation into the neutrosophic domain. Afterwards, three distinct pattern descriptors, i.e., MsTrP, NrTxP, and RiTxP, are derived at multiple scales from the three neutrosophic images. The proposed MsNrRiTxP pattern descriptor is obtained by scale-wise concatenation of the joint histograms of MsTrP×RiTxP and NrTxP×RiTxP. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system, medical images of different modalities, i.e., CT and MRI, from four test datasets are considered in our experimental setup. The retrieval performance of the proposed approach is exhaustively compared with several existing, recent, and state-of-the-art local binary pattern-based variants. The retrieval rates obtained by the proposed approach for the noise-free and noisy variants of the test datasets are observed to be substantially higher than the compared ones.