Feature-based brain MRI retrieval for Alzheimer disease diagnosis

In this paper we consider the application of the feature-based approach to medical image retrieval, particularly brain MRI scans for early Alzheimer´s disease diagnosis. The key idea is to provide the doctor with the images which have similar visual properties and have full case record, giving the ability to make more informed decision in the prodromal phase of the disease. With regard to the state-of-the art SIFT features in a Bag-of-Visual-Words approach we propose to use the Laguerre Circular Harmonic Functions coefficients as feature vectors. An additional pre-classification step based on estimation of Alzheimer´s disease early image abnormalities is proposed to improve overall precision.