On Archiving and Retrieval of Sequential Images from Tomographic Databases in PACS
C-R. Shyu, Tony Cai, and L. S. Broderick
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Abstract:
In the picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) used in
modern hospitals, the current practice is to retrieve images based on keyword search which returns a complete set of images from the same scan. Both
diagnostically useful and negligible images in the image databases are retrieved and browsed by the physicians. In
addition to the text-based search query method, queries based on image contents and image examples have been
developed and integrated into existing PACS systems. Most of the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems
for medical image databases are designed to retrieve images individually. But in a database of tomographic images,
it is often diagnostically more useful to simultaneously retrieve multiple images that are closely related for various
reasons, such as physiological contiguousness, etc. For example, high resolution computed tomography (HRCT)
images are taken in a series of cross-sectional slices of human body. Typically, several slices are relevant for making
a diagnosis, requiring a PACS system that can retrieve a contiguous sequence of slices. In this paper, we present
an extension to our physician-in-the-loop CBIR system that allows our algorithms to automatically determine the
number of adjoining images to retain after certain key images are identified by the physician. Only the key images,
so identified by the physician, and the other adjoining images that cohere with the key images are kept on-line for
fast retrieval; the rest of the images can be discarded if so desired. This results in large reduction in the amount of
storage needed for fast retrieval.
- Paper: pdf file.