Clinical Experience Sharing by Similar Case Retrieval

Clinical experience sharing (CES) is a useful concept for both medical treatment and medical education purposes. One way of implementing CES is through the use of content based case retrieval (CBCR), where database of medical cases is browsed for case instances that are similar to the input query case. In this study, we introduce a new project called case retrieval in radiology (CaReRa), which aims at implementing CES for liver cases. We particularly focus on 3D liver images acquired by computed tomography (CT) and lay the foundations of a conceptual system outputting a ranked list of results for a given query case, formulated in this work as a liver lesion. A list of CT image features serves as computer generated descriptors together with user expressed annotations collected using a novel ontology of liver for radiology (ONLIRA). A two stage approach is proposed to utilize these two types of descriptorsin cascade, namely semantic framing and similarity ranking. Initial retrieval performance results confirm the importance of ontology based descriptors, while also highlights the foci of future work needed to overcome the weaknesses.