Visual character N-grams for classification and retrieval of radiological images

Diagnostic radiology struggles to maintain high interpretation accuracy. Retrieval of past similar cases would help the inexperienced radiologist in the interpretation process. Character n-gram model has been effective in text retrieval context in languages such as Chinese where there are no clear word boundaries. We propose the use of visual character n-gram model for representation of image for classification and retrieval purposes. Regions of interests in mammographic images are represented with the character n-gram features. These features are then used as input to back-propagation neural network for classification of regions into normal and abnormal categories. Experiments on miniMIAS database show that character n-gram features are useful in classifying the regions into normal and abnormal categories. Promising classification accuracies are observed (83.33%) for fatty background tissue warranting further investigation. We argue that Classifying regions of interests would reduce the number of comparisons necessary for finding similar images from the database and hence would reduce the time required for retrieval of past similar cases