Multiple semantic X-ray medical image retrieval using efficient feature vector extracted by FPN.

Objective: Content-based medical image retrieval (CBMIR) has become an important part of computer-aided diagnostics (CAD) systems. The complex medical semantic information inherent in medical images is the most difficult part to improve the accuracy of image retrieval. Highly expressive feature vectors play a crucial role in the search process. In this paper, we propose an effective deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model to extract concise feature vectors for multiple semantic X-ray medical image retrieval.

Methods: We build a feature pyramid based CNN model with ResNet50V2 backbone to extract multi-level semantic information. And we use the well-known public multiple semantic annotated X-ray medical image data set IRMA to train and test the proposed model.

Results: Our method achieves an IRMA error of 32.2, which is the best score compared to the existing literature on this dataset.

Conclusions: The proposed CNN model can effectively extract multi-level semantic information from X-ray medical images. The concise feature vectors can improve the retrieval accuracy of multi-semantic and unevenly distributed X-ray medical images.