Effective Semantic Features to Improve Retrieval of Lung Nodules in Ct Scan Images

Abstract

Successful treatment of a patient depends on the accurate determination of the disease type. The advent of big data facilitates the retrieving of medical images and helps physicians in reliable diagnoses using content-based medical image retrieval systems (CBMIR). They consist of a feature extraction module and a distance metric. The extracted textural or deep-based features identify different types of diseases. In the proposed retrieval algorithm, we use the gray level cooccurrence matrix as the common textural characteristics and integrate them with semantic attributes. The semantic features are the geometric characteristics of the tumor that a radiologist employ to distinguish between benign and malignant tumors. These high-level attributes include the Euler number, margin smoothness, and the aspect ratio of the lesion’s size. We used the Minkowski distance measure for computing the similarity of images and applied the proposed algorithm to 200 CT-scan data containing lung lesions obtained from the LIDC database. The types of lesions were benign and malignant. Employing an ablation study, we proved the effectiveness of the semantic feature. The precision of the retrieval results is 93% which is promising compared to recent studies. In the future, we plan to define other kinds of semantic attributes to distinguish stages 1–5 of lung tumors as well.