Document Abstract

Lee DJ, Antani S, Chang Y, Gledhill K, Long LR, Christensen P.

CBIR of Spine X-ray Images On Inter-vertebral Disc Space and Shape Profiles Using Feature Ranking and Voting Consensus.

Data & Knowledge Engineering, Special Issue on "Knowledge Discovery in Medicine". 2009;Article in Press..

Very limited research is published in the literature that applies content-based image retrieval (CBIR) techniques to retrieval of digitized spine X-ray images that combines inter-vertebral disc space and vertebral shape profiles. This paper describes a novel technique for retrieving vertebra pairs that exhibit a specified disc space narrowing (DSN) and inter-vertebral disc shape. DSN is characterized using spatial and geometrical features between two adjacent vertebrae. In order to obtain the best retrieval result, all selected features are ranked and assigned a weight to indicate their importance in the computation of the final similarity measure. Using a two phase algorithm, initial retrieval results are clustered and used to construct a voting committee to retrieve vertebra pairs with the highest DSN similarity. The overall retrieval accuracy is validated by a radiologist and proves that selected features combined with voting consensus are effective for DSN-based spine X-ray image retrieval.

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