An overview of approaches for content-based medical image retrieval

Medical imaging performs a vital role in the medical field as it provides important information on the internal body parts for the clinical analysis and medical intervention which enables physicians to diagnose and treat a variety of diseases. Nowadays the medical diagnosis is increasing at a very high rate, which results in the formation of a huge medical image database, and retrieving similar medical images from such a huge database is a very difficult task. A literature review of various methods for biomedical image indexing and retrieval is presented here. Over 140 contributions are included from the literature in this survey. And it is mainly concentrated on the methodology based on the visual representation of the medical images as content-based medical image retrieval (CBMIR) approaches retrieve similar medical images more efficiently as compared to text-based biomedical image retrieval approaches. It also delineates how various ideas were adopted from different computer science methodologies for developing CBMIR systems. © 2017, Springer-Verlag London Ltd.