Journal
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL INFORMATICS ASSOCIATION
Volume 20, Issue 6, Pages 1076-1081Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001380
Keywords
Image Retrieval; Object Detection; Ontology
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Funding
- Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Clinic CTSA [UL1 RR024989]
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Background Visual information is a crucial aspect of medical knowledge. Building a comprehensive medical image base, in the spirit of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), would greatly benefit patient education and self-care. However, collection and annotation of such a large-scale image base is challenging. Objective To combine visual object detection techniques with medical ontology to automatically mine web photos and retrieve a large number of disease manifestation images with minimal manual labeling effort. Methods As a proof of concept, we first learnt five organ detectors on three detection scales for eyes, ears, lips, hands, and feet. Given a disease, we used information from the UMLS to select affected body parts, ran the pretrained organ detectors on web images, and combined the detection outputs to retrieve disease images. Results Compared with a supervised image retrieval approach that requires training images for every disease, our ontology-guided approach exploits shared visual information of body parts across diseases. In retrieving 2220 web images of 32 diseases, we reduced manual labeling effort to 15.6% while improving the average precision by 3.9% from 77.7% to 81.6%. For 40.6% of the diseases, we improved the precision by 10%. Conclusions The results confirm the concept that the web is a feasible source for automatic disease image retrieval for health image database construction. Our approach requires a small amount of manual effort to collect complex disease images, and to annotate them by standard medical ontology terms.
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