Pathology-centric medical image retrieval with hierarchical contextual spatial descriptor

Content-based image retrieval has been suggested as an aid to medical diagnosis. Techniques based on standard feature descriptors, however, might not represent optimally the pathological characteristics in medical images. In this paper, we propose a new approach for medical image retrieval based on pathology-centric feature extraction and representation; and patch-based local feature extraction and hierarchical contextual spatial descriptor are designed. The proposed method is evaluated on positron emission tomography - computed tomography (PET-CT) images from subjects with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), showing promising performance improvements over the other benchmarked techniques.