Cervicographic image retrieval by spatial similarity of lesions

The National Library of Medicine has been developing CervigramFinder, a Web-accessible prototype content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system for cervical cancer research, to retrieve cervicographic images from a large collection with respect to visual characteristics of lesion regions. This paper describes current work on retrieving the images based on similarity of spatial location of lesions. The proposed two-level method takes into account the visual characteristics of cervix lesions, as well as spatial information of shape, size, orientation, and distance. The proposed method was evaluated on a data set of 1000 cervicographic images where multiple lesion boundaries as well as associated location information were marked by medical experts. The simplicity and effectiveness of the proposed method was subjectively compared with the angle histogram and R-histogram and was evaluated as better with respect to results ranking.